商务英语综合教程（上册）Unit_4_Multinational_Corporations教材教学课件.ppt

Unit Four ;Introduction; Text ; 1 International business, in the sense of trade across frontiers, has existed for thousands of years. But in the decades since World War II, there has been a burgeoning of international business activity on an unprecedented scale, and this has represented a significant change, not merely in terms of scale, but of the nature of the activity. ; 2 In the early decades following World War II, the most obvious phenomenon was the change in emphasis from exporting to local assembly or manufacture. Before World War II there were already a number of companies which would be described as multinationals, in the sense that they manufactured in different parts of the world. They were, however, comparatively small in number and scale. The first step in the internationalization of business after the War was simply a very rapid growth in fairly traditional terms, in the sense that more and more companies in one developed country set up their own, or bought over existing, manufacturing facilities in other countries. ; 3 As development of such business activities grew rapidly, they had not only been variously defined in different studies, but labeled with different names. Among the most common terms used to refer to the multinational business firm are: the Multinational Corporation (MNC), the Multinational Enterprise (MNE) and the Transnational Corporation (TNC), the last being the term commonly employed by agencies of the United Nations. To avoid misunderstanding and confusion, a formal definition has been arrived at. ; Formal Definitions 4 A multinational enterprise shall be defined as a business organization which owns (whether wholly or partly), controls and manages assets, often including productive resources, in more than one country, through its member companies incorporated separately in each of these countries. Each member company is known as a multinational corporation. Each MNC