Developing a Model of the Risks of International Strategic Alliances in Home Appliance Industry in Iran

Today, many Iranian and foreign companies consider partnering with each other. Iranian companies strive to partner with foreign companies to build the capacity needed to achieve their business goals and foreign companies also tend to reach new markets by partnering with local partners. However, despite the government's emphasis and the efforts of Iranian companies to attract foreign partners, this has hardly happened in the Iranian home appliance industry, indicating risks to both domestic and foreign investors. Therefore, the present study aims to investigate, identify and model the risks that Iranian companies face in Strategic Alliance with foreign companies in Iranian home appliance industry.

This research is done in pragmatism paradigm, using exploratory sequential mixed method. In the qualitative phase, the Strategic Alliance risks are discovered through semi-structured interviews using qualitative content analysis approach. Then in the quantitative phase, the required data were collected by a questionnaire from industry experts and financial professionals and were analyzed with Interpretive Structural Modeling (ISM). The statistical population includes the experts, university professors as well as the board of directors, senior managers and specialists of companies active in Iran home appliance industry and their foreign partner.

187 phrases were extracted from a total number of 18 interviews with 20 experts. These phrases were then classified into 69 indices using content analysis. The final model consists of a total of 22 elements as the perceived risks of international Strategic Alliance in three stages of the formation, operation and termination of alliance.

The results show that at the beginning stage (formation) of Strategic Alliance, the factors of “partner selection”, “opportunistic behavior”, “negative inter-dependence to the partner” and “weaknesses in international contracts” are at the highest level and have the least impact. Besides, "political risks" and "legal risks" are at the second and third levels having more impact on other factors. At the operational stage of the alliance, factors such as "low value of made-in-Iran brand", "internal differences in management", "non-compliance", "opportunistic behavior", "high price", "poor raw material supply infrastructure" and "demand risks" are at the highest levels with the least impact and the factors such as "political risks", "legal risks" and "economic risks" are at the lowest level with the highest impact on other factors. At the termination stage of alliance, the factors of "international litigation problems" and "evaluation and determination of the partners' share" are at the highest level having the least impact and the "legal risks" factor is at the lowest level having the most impact on the other factors. The sets of risks involved in each stage of the Strategic Alliance have mutual impacts on each other.