Does Multinationality Matter the Firm Performance?

Purpose - The relationship between multinationality and performance has become a hot topic in academic circles and is very important for multinational firms, especially for Chinese multinational firms, who need more experience to enter the international market. Given this background, this paper attempts to figure out the importance of multinationality to China’s firm performance and to explore whether the Four-stage Theory can also be applied to China’s firms. Research design, data, and methodology - We employ the panel data of 435 multinational firms from 2008 to 2017 chosen from China’s A-shares to conduct an empirical analysis by using a fixed-effects model. In the paper, the performance is represented by ROA (return on assets), treated as a dependent variable, and multinationality is represented by FSTS (foreign sales/total sales), treated as an independent variable. Results - We find that the performance first decreases then rises, then falls down, and rises again in the end. Hence there is a W-shaped relationship between the multinationality of the Chinese manufacturing industries and firm performance, proving that the four-stage theory is also applicable to Chinese multinational firms. Conclusions - These empirical results can provide some advice for policymakers to improve the firm performance such as reducing the logistics cost of multinationality.