Strategies to entry the Chinese food and beverage market : evidences from European SMEs and development of a model

China became the world’s largest consumer market for Food and Beverage, making it an increasingly attractive option for foreign brands. Considering only European food exports toward China, in the last 5 years they grew by 176%. Today’s dramatically reduced trade barriers, improved transportation and telecommunications links, and breakthroughs in information technologies now make it possible for smaller companies to gain a global scope. Even if engaging international markets is directly related to the company’s strategic choice, the selection of the best alternative to pursue is biased by the unique feature of the destination country. Especially for SMEs that want to exploit growth opportunities far away from their country it is important to relate strategic choices with more tactical and operative ones. Compared to large businesses, SMEs face higher risk when it comes to operationalize in-house the strategy. As long as the scale becomes smaller, the financial and infrastructural investments required have a higher impact on the company funding capability. Consequently, there is an interest for small companies in providing alternatives that do not only relate to high strategical level, but also face the tactical and operative contextualization of a real case. The international logistics strategies have been examined by studying individual aspects separately. Only in the recent years, researchers started to give a structured description of the variables determining the global expansion of the companies. However, these articles are focused on the bigger scale of the multinational corporations and aim at comprehensive and generalizable high level strategies, neglecting the relevant role of small medium enterprises in the global market and their specific needs. Therefore, this study provides a focused drill down on European SMEs that want to engage the Chinese Food and Beverage Market. By starting from a deep review of the academic literature, the main factors that could potentially impact on the internationalization logistics process are identified. Then, as suggested by previous researches, case studies are derived from unstructured interviews held locally with European SMEs currently operating in China. Merging the two source of information, it was possible to identify the relevant factors and to explain the interactions between them. Worth mentioning is relevance of the relationships with the Logistics Service Providers for the internationalization of the interviewed companies. Moreover, the empirical evidence drives to the conclusion that the internationalization stages of the Uppsala Model (Johanson and Vahlne, 1977) can be pertinently applied to the specific case of the SMEs, even though with some modifications. Indeed, there is a relation between internationalization phase, relationship with LSP and the company knowledge level. Therefore, a matrix model is drawn to illustrates the relationship between them and facilitate its understandability. By interviewing also other experienced actors indirectly involved (e.g. freight forwarders, distributors, legal consultants) it was possible to broaden the empirical evidence base from the field and test the goodness and correctness of the model. From the information collected during the interviews and the academic literature review, a series of operative advices are given to ease the entry of a SME in the Chinese Food and Beverage Market.