Russia's Integration to the Globalized Automotive System: Solutions Adopted by Multinationals and Impact on the Local Industrial Environment

Abstract

In the last 30 years, the automotive sector was marked by a strong internationalization that has led to the creation of a strongly integrated system. Russia was one of the latest BRICS countries that Car manufacturers (OEMs) attempted to connect to the system. Based on 44 interviews of several players of the automotive industry, over a period of 10 years, we intend to identify the major barriers or influencing factors that may have hindered Russia’s integration during the starting phase. The analysis of the respondents’ answers on how they managed these factors helps us understand how these could be overcome and whether it was necessary to adapt the original approach. Finally, we investigate on the impact of the automotive integration to the local business environment to see whether it was a mere superposition of a foreign system or whether local companies could be part of its success.

The past, the present, and the foreseeable future of Russian manufacturing subsidiaries of Western multinational corporations

“…We should also point out a "chain of works" that presents from different angles the mechanisms of the innovative development of Russian subsidiaries of MNCs (Gurkov, 2014(Gurkov, , 2015Gurkov & Filippov, 2013;Gurkov & Saidov, 2017a). Finally, there are a few papers that retrace the development of Russian industries, which dominate foreign-owned companies (see Berman, 2011;Montenero, 2018).…”