Cultural differences when entering a new market - A study of Swedish companies entering the Eastern European markets

Abstract: When a company moves to a foreign market, it must learn how to deal with that market’s particular culture. A country’s culture can mean its language, religion, norms and so on. A company needs to take many different factors into account when moving to a foreign market and certain markets are riskier than others. If a Swedish company would expand to Norway, there may not be that many cultural differences, but if the new market is South Africa for example, then certain questions regarding cultural differences would come up. The purpose of this dissertation is to find out more about Swedish companies’ problems with cultural differences in emerging markets. This is done through research concerning secondary and primary data. The secondary data came from literature on the topic, and the primary data come from interviews with Swedish companies that have moved into emerging markets. We base the research on case studies involving two Swedish companies, Culinar and Bong Ljungdahl. These two firms expanded in to Eastern Europe while the region was going through a period with high growth, thereby making most of the countries emerging markets. The aim is to see how these two companies dealt with the issues concerning cultural differences when they arrived at the foreign market.