Past studies have established that Emerging-Market Multinationals (EMNEs) adopt aggressive asset-seeking strategies in foreign markets (springboard strategies) to augment their technological capabilities and bolster their competitive position in their respective home countries. But we still lack concrete knowledge of whether and under what conditions they effectively orchestrate their expanding asset portfolio to drive subsequent international growth, that is, growth across their network of foreign subsidiaries. Our paper addresses this gap. We draw on the Penrosean perspective to explain that EMNE’s asset orchestration relies heavily on managerial learning about the utilization of new resources, leading to the creation of resource fungibilities across foreign markets and subsequently to revenue growth in those markets. Interestingly, we find that the revenue growth effect weakens – to the point of de-growth – as the complexity of EMNEs asset portfolio increases, indicating limits to EMNEs’ asset orchestration effectiveness. We attribute this reduction to constraints on the managerial capacity for learning and cross-border coordination at EMNE’s headquarters. We test and find evidence for our arguments, utilizing a novel dataset of foreign subsidiaries of Indian pharma multinationals which exhibit a preference for cross-border acquisition-led international expansion. Our study extends the springboard perspective by shedding light on outcomes of global asset orchestration, which is critical for springboard strategies. The findings highlight complementarity between classical Penrosean and dynamic capability-based MNE asset orchestration perspectives.
