Western companies face many obstacles when expanding their businesses internationally. They must navigate complex issues such as lack of intellectual property protections, differing cultural norms regarding issues like child labor and workplace relationships, heavy bureaucracy, corruption, and disrespect for contracts. Companies must also adapt to variations in language, business practices, ethics, and legal systems between countries. Resolving these challenges requires thorough research on the target country's culture and policies to understand differences from the home country.

1. The obstacles in business western companies face when taking their businesses abroad.
Christian Lopez
International Business
New Jersey City University

2. Western companies face a lot of obstacles when trying to take their successful businesses
into other countries. Lack of strict intellectual property laws in some countries make it really
difficult for companies to fight for their property in the court of law when they feel that it has
been stolen by a competitor. Hiring staffing companies that employ children to work on
producing items for the company can also become a problem. This is why you must know the
company’s policies if you are going to use a third party to find employees for you, especially
when it comes to child labor. A western company knows that it’s wrong and you cannot hire a
child to work for a company when they are not old enough.
Hill (2014) touches upon a situation that you might face when hiring children. A lot of
the times children working is not looked at positively, but in some really poor countries it’s
either work in these “sweatshops” or something more extreme like having to resort to
prostitution. This is an ethical dilemma that you can face when doing business in some poor
countries. Is there a right answer to this situation? Let the child work and you will get criticism
from most industrialized nations. Fire the child and later you find out that child is killed while
begging for money on the street or like Hill’s example, dies from aids after resorting to
prostitution for money to be able to eat (Hill, 2014). Something like this situation weighs heavy
on someone, so this moral dilemma example just adds on to obstacles and situations that
companies and their leaders come across when taking their business to another country.
Other things a company will face are situations like bribery and corruption. Business
ethics are also not universal as we learned in our readings of Hill (2014). He states that some
companies in the United States have people sign contracts in order to prevent problems from
occurring and for both parties to be protected while other countries sign contracts and then not
abide by them. Hill says that in other countries signing a contract does not mean that they have to

3. strictly abide by it and therefore even the courts have the same belief. While in the United States
all the contract is, is an agreement that you will abide by such laid out rules (Hill, 2014).
Having to go through a lot of red tape for normal business practices is also common in
other countries. In the United States for the most part everything can be submitted and done
electronically for your company. But when going to another country this is not always the case.
As a Business Insider article states, a task that should only take a couple minutes in the U.S. by
filling in and sending out paperwork electronically will take hours if that country requires you to
fill in information on forms by hand. US-Pacific Rim International is the company that wrote that
business insider article and they help US companies overseas with marketing and sales. They
also state in that article that extra red tape like this can take up a lot of time which will give you
less time to work on your actual business tasks (USPRI, 2010).
In that same Business Insider article USPRI states that it is a good idea to specifically
hire people to handle all the extra paperwork that your company will have to file in an effort to
allow your managers to be able to work and not have to worry about the forms they have to fill
out. Will this add an extra cost to your company? The answer is yes, but it is a necessary cost
when doing business overseas otherwise your international managers will have a lot of time
wasted on all the red tape they have to go through and not be able to focus on the business goals.
You have to understand that every country is different so you might have a certain
amount of employees performing your tasks in one country and have a larger group of
employees performing the same tasks in another country. Depending on the countries
regulations, for your business to effectively operate the extra employees are sometimes
necessary.

4. A business would like it if they could just clone the same situation they have going on in
their home country and bring that set up to every country they want to operate in. But you can’t.
Countries are all different, from regulations, to culture to norms and ethics. I read in our textbook
that Walmart went to set up stores in Germany and the customers there did not like the idea of a
greeter, which Walmart has at all their stores in the U.S. The book says in German culture it is
not a normal thing to greet strangers, so customers weren’t comfortable with the Walmart
employee greeting them (Hill, 2014).
German customers found it weird to have someone bothering them as soon as they walk
into the store. Hill goes on to say that Walmart responded by removing the worker from the
greeter position soon after complaints came in. Another difference is most western companies
like their employees to be smiling and in a happy mood when greeting their customers. Yet again
since there are differences in culture, whenever a German female cashier was smiling at the male
customer the customer read it as the cashier was trying to be flirtatious (Hill, 2014). This just
proves that before going into a different country you must study their culture.
Business norms are also different country to country. In the U.S. employers make it clear
that it is unprofessional for coworkers to form romantic relationships and they especially don’t
approve when someone in a position of authority in the company like a manager has a
relationship with someone they oversee. This is a problem because other workers can feel that
the manger might show favoritism for the person they are in a relationship with and assign tough
tasks to other workers while letting their significant other perform only easy tasks. To avoid all
these problems companies let you know that when you’re at work you are here to work,
whatever you do on your free time is something they don’t monitor.

5. But overseas Walmart tried to implement the same rule in Germany, and as Hill (2014)
tells us German employees did not like it and saw Walmart as “hating on love.” He goes on to
say that the countries employees were not used to having rules over their romantic life whether
they were at work or not.
In one of the chapters in our textbook Hill (2014) touched upon how Starbucks had to sue
a Chinese company for stealing and infringing on their copy written logo and similar look. This
company even had the same name as Starbucks just spelled out in Chinese according to him. I
don’t understand how people can blatantly steal somebody else’s copy written ideas, but they
did. The name Starbucks wasn’t even closely associated with coffee sales prior to the company’s
establishment. So the Chinese owner claiming that it’s just a pure coincidence the two companies
share the same name is laughable. The Chinese competitor logo is also very similar to the real
Starbucks logo and how the stores are organized from the color schemes used to the furniture
they have inside of the shops are all closely copied off the real Starbucks (Hill, 2014).
I read a report on The Cristian Science Monitor’s website that that tried to give some
explanation to why the Chinese partake in copyright infringement and why their culture feels that
it’s okay. According to this report the Chinese feel like they have to play catch up because under
the last president that was ruling not much business ideas and innovation were occurring. Now
the Chinese feel like they are so far behind that the only way to catchup is to steal these ideas
because it would just take entirely too long for them to think of them there selves (China, 2013).
That article also says the Chinese feel like they are incapable of innovation, they feel like they
are just not on the level to think of these rapid ideas at the level that western companies are
currently. This is obviously just one writer or editors beliefs but it could hold some truth.

6. Like we saw in the Starbucks case from the textbook, fighting a case overseas is different
than in the united states because the culture and laws are different everywhere. So what might
seem like an obvious rip off of someone’s intellectual property in the United States, the same
might not be so clear in an overseas court room. These court battles can take a really long time to
settle and there is not guarantee that you will win even though you are the party who should win
in the end.
Hill (2014) lets us know that Starbucks ended up winning their case and they received
damages from the Chinese competition, but it was something as small as a few thousand dollars
which is less than the actual damages the competitor has caused the Starbucks brand. It’s also
less than what Starbucks has paid their lawyers to defend them in that court room. The bigger
win is in principle and the fact that competition can no longer use the logo that looks so much
like Starbucks and their store look (Hill 2014). This is just a risk that can occur and you have to
foresee things like this happening so you are well prepared when they do.
Sometimes competition can also hack your computer systems. There also have been cases
in our textbook where workers for competing firms will break into your facility and steal
blueprints and anything of value that you might have. It’s currently illegal in the United States to
hack someone even though they have hacked you first. So lots of American companies have to
just focus on playing defense against Chinese hackers who steal the company’s intellectual
property (Clarke, 2012). Most companies just see how they were hacked and work on trying to
prevent that from happening again by getting better cyber security in place. Will this method be
effective? It will help but not stop it, because hackers spend all day trying to hack companies and
this is all they do, so if they want information that you have stored on your servers chances are

7. eventually they’ll find a way to access the information no matter what type of cyber security
system you might have in place.
The NSA leaks that Eric Snowden provided gave the Chinese a sort of justification
feeling on why they steal the IP of western companies. The Chinese feel like they are justified in
what they do because the United States also are spying on them according to the Snowden leaks
(Wee, 2013). But there’s a big difference in what the United States does to China and what
China does to the United States. The United States is not stealing their intellectual property and
then giving that information to other American companies to use to their advantage. What the
Eric Snowden leaks proved were that the United States was indeed spying on one of the top
Chinese communications company, but not to steal their property and ideas but rather to infiltrate
their systems so that they can see if the company is purposely funded by the Chinese government
to steal western companies ideas and technology (Sanger & Perlroth, 2014). Even though this
Chinese company has been accused of stealing in the past they continually deny it.
One of the biggest problems company’s face when going overseas to do business in other
countries is corruption. Don’t get me wrong there is corruption in whatever country you take
your business too, but some countries like the United States label corruption as illegal and have
consequences for the people who break the laws. In other countries corruption and bribery are
seen as things that happen in business to speed up process or skip some paperwork. They don’t
find it to be a bad thing. To reference my reading in the textbook again there was a story about
when Walmart took their business over to Mexico that touched upon corruption and bribery.
Hill (2014) said Walmart would pay government officials to redraw zoning perimeters so
that they could build their store in a heavy traffic area. On top of that, Walmart was accused of

8. building stores on top of ancient ruins. Lutz, a writer for Business Insider also reports of ancient
graves and walls dating to the 1300’s were said to be found when clearing out the areas to build
some stores (2012).
Walmart was paying into the bribery and corruption because they have the money to do
such a thing. But tons of western companies stay out of countries because of corruption. They
fear that paying off officials and bribing them would feed into the corruption which would not be
an ethical thing to do. Not to mention having to pay off people just so business operations can
take place and for paperwork to be processed can really weigh on a company’s profits.
Entering another country the manager in charge of that countries business should also
know or be willing to learn the language of the country that he is managing in. This was
something that also comes from the reading of “Why Walmart failed in Germany” and they cite
as one of their early problems was their first CEO overseas did not care to learn the language and
forced everyone at the corporate level to speak English (Hill, 2014).
Another cultural difference the U.S. has from other countries is in the U.S. you are
encouraged to tell on anyone who you think is doing something that goes against the company
policy like supervisor-employee relationships for example. In other countries they feel like
telling on someone or being a “rat” is something that is not culturally viewed as appropriate (Hill
2014).
For western companies to succeed in doing business overseas they almost have to forget
everything they have learned about doing business in their home country because this new
country will more than likely be totally different. One must spend time studying the culture and
the business practices of this new area prior to getting involved. The manager or person in charge

9. of this new countries operations should know how to speak the native language or at least
commit there selves to learning it. In business you wouldn’t want to go through a translator for
the existence of your business because even translators can misinterpret words and the context
they are used in. You should also stay true to your company’s values and the business ethics that
made you successful, but also be receptive of the business and cultural norms of this new country
and try to learn and understand them. If you understand the country and its culture the better off
you will be at having that country as part of your customers because they won’t see you as an
outside western company anymore because of how well you have adapted to their culture.

10. References
China must end cyberspying on US industry, look to its own innovation. (2013, May 7).
Retrieved November 24, 2014, from http://www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/the-monitors-
view/2013/0507/China-must-end-cyberspying-on-US-industry-look-to-its-own-innovation?n
Clarke, R. (2012, April 2). How China Steals Our Secrets. Retrieved November 24, 2014, from
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/03/opinion/how-china-steals-our-secrets.html?_r=1&
Hill, C. (2014). International business: Competing in the global marketplace (Tenth ed.). New
York: McGraw Hill Education.
International, U. (2010, December 13). The 5 Biggest Challenges Businesses Face When They
Expand To China. Retrieved November 24, 2014, from http://www.businessinsider.com/the-five-
biggest-practical-challenges-for-foreign-smes-in-the-chinese-market-2010-12
Lutz, K. (2012, December 18). 7 Stunning New Details About Walmart's Mexican Bribery
Scandal. Retrieved November 24, 2014, from http://www.businessinsider.com/new-details-in-
walmart-bribery-scandal-2012-12
Sanger, D., & Perlroth, N. (2014, March 22). N.S.A. Breached Chinese Servers Seen as Security
Threat. Retrieved November 24, 2014, from
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/23/world/asia/nsa-breached-chinese-servers-seen-as-spy-
peril.html
Wee, S. (2013, June 27). China accuses U.S. of cyber security hypocrisy amid Snowden dispute.
Retrieved November 24, 2014, from http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/06/27/net-us-usa-
security-china-idUSBRE95Q0LR20130627