International Entrepreneurship: NICO leading the way
International entrepreneurship is the study of cross-border entrepreneurial behaviour focusing on how actors discover, enact, analyze and exploit opportunities in the creation of new goods or services.
I have always been impressed by leadership of one Felix Mlusu (MD of NICO Holdings), who I understand is preparing to hand-over the baton to my friend Vizenge Kumwenda. Vizenge was one year ahead of me at Chichiri Secondary School and I have always known him as a smart, intelligent and hard-working lad. I am not surprised where he is now. Soon he will be leading one of the most innovative companies in Malawi. NICO is a very dynamic and visionary company and this boils down to leadership and international entrepreneurship.
McDougall and Oviatt’s (2000, p. 903) defines international entrepreneurship as a “ combination of innovative, proactive and risk seeking behaviour that crosses national borders and is intended to create value in organizations”. A modification of McDougall and Oviatt’s (1994) definition of entrepreneurship is given by Stevenson and Jarillo (1990, p. 23), for them entrepreneurship is “a courageous managerial value creation process through which an individual engages innovative, proactive, calculated risk-taking behaviour designed to prosecute foreign business opportunities presented by multinational market successes and imperfections for financial and non-financial rewards”. Firms always strive to achieve growth and make more profits; one way of doing so is to expand the market for their products or services by going into international markets. The reasons for planning to internationalize seem to be the same for all the firms (i.e. profit, expansion, market opportunity)
I believe NICO has shown that international entrepreneurship after realising that Malawi is a small market and they can only increase value for their company by investing abroad. If I am not wrong NICO is now operating in Uganda, Zambia and Tanzania and Zimbabwe. A couple of months ago I sat with Vizenge over breakfast in AVENIDA hotel in Maputo. His mission was to explore further investment in Mozambique. I know they will do it.
This is what our leadership should be promoting. I would be surprised if Malawi Government or its leadership has ever taken any interest to ask NICO how they can support them to grow their international operations. My bet is using Zero Deficit Budget Government has been seeking ways to tax NICO.
What does a country gain in internationalisation? Exactly what our dear President is accusing Game Stores and Shoprite. You repatriate the profits and dividends. You create a market for your goods and services. You create employment and learning experience for your highly skilled citizens. Take for example Peoples (formerly PTC). Operating outside Malawi means you have outlets for your Malawians raw and processed goods. If you open operations in a highly sophisticated market, it means your home producers improve on quality to meet market requirements. It means your dividends and profits will be a forex inflow for the country.
It is high time Government takes interest and sits down on the table with companies like Press Corporation, National Bank, NBS, Mulli Brothers, MTL, and the little that we are left with to strategise and help grow these companies out of Malawi.
Let 2012 be a year of smart thinking Malawians and we will not achieve this if we look inward. Let us look outward. The world is too busy to wait for Malawi. We are irrelevant and a destruction with our strange ideas.
Happy New Year from Chihoro Castle
No comments:
Post a Comment