Enhancing International Performance of Exporting Firms through E-Business Integration

Abstract

The growth of information and communication technologies over the past decade has radically transformed the way we communicate, learn and do business. The Internet and e-business solutions have brought many benefits to businesses, especially lowering information and communication costs, gathering intelligence on target market and maintaining collaboration among their internal and external business processes to meet the demands of competition in today's dynamic business environment. Despite the rapidly growing literature on e-business, research on the impact of e-business in the internationalization process of exporting firms is comparatively limited. This study investigates the relationship between organizational use of e-business technologies, composed of communication, intelligence, and collaboration, and international performance of exporting firms by using partial-least squares (PLS) modelling, a second-generation technique in structural equation modelling (SEM), on data drawn from a survey of 70 exporting firms in North Cyprus. The findings show an existing relationship between e-business adoption and international performance of exporting firms.