Historique de l'entreprise Electrolux (texte en anglais)

Historic development of the domestic appliances segment of Electrolux based on the Global Integration / Local Responsiveness Framework

Looking at the history of Electrolux and other MNCs in the sector of appliances for home and professional use there is a huge development observable during the last 50 years. Companies have switched from being a small local producer of a single product to being a worldwide provider of a big variety of appliances with many different characteristics. In the following section we would like to get an insight of this change by looking at one of the best known model to explain what determines a company’s decision about its strategic positioning in the world market: the Global Integration / Local Responsiveness Framework by Bartlett and Ghoshal (1989) (Figure 1). The main contribution of this model is that companies are influenced by external forces towards an adaption to the local environment in the corresponding host countries (leading to local responsiveness) and also by forces towards standardisation in order to reach global efficiency (leading to global integration). Forces for local responsiveness can emerge through differences in demand or differences in country conditions whereas global integration is mostly desirable when customer needs are homogenous and technical standards similar throughout countries in order to reach economies of scale (Morschett/Schramm-Klein/Zentes 2010, pp. 29 et seq.).

To answer now the question about the positioning in the case of Electrolux we should first distinguish five different time periods in order to recognize the historical development: The 1960s, the 1970s, the 1980s, the 1990s and the 21st century. Furthermore a differentiation between segments within Electrolux can also be made. On the one hand we will discuss the production element and on the other hand the branding as they show very nicely the divergent development over the above mentioned time periods.

In the 1960s the company was quite a small player mostly active in the northern european countries. Through the acquisition of a Swedish competitor Electrolux gained access to some technologies (in freezing) and some new product groups (cookers). It started to aquire 3 larger scandinavian businesses in 1967 in order to catch up with the growing international competition and to further improve their innovation skills and product range. During that period Electrolux can be seen as a local company starting to get some foreign subidiaries. (Zentes, Swoboda, Morschett, pp. 7 et seq.).

In the 1970s the company strongly continued to aquire other companies in Europe and in the USA as well. It also started to diversify into new product areas in order to enter new markets. Its market shares in the domestic appliances sector rised steadily. At the end of the 1970s Electrolux has clearly become a MNC producing for a large market. As the production was very concentrated, the same type of products were produced at the same plant, the company can be seen as a global organisation at that time from the production side of view (Zentes, Swoboda, Morschett, pp. 9 et seq.). The interesting part is that even though production was delegated from one or only a few centralized hubs, the branding did not follow this pattern. Electrolux insisted, compared to its main overseas competitors, in keeping most of the regional brands even after having acquired many local companies (Zentes,

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