The purpose of this thesis is to examine the technological strategies of Korean firms in the global telecommunication exchange system business. This thesis primarily focused on research questions as follows;
First, What is the current technological development stage of Korean telecommunication exchange system business and what are the structural characteristics of it ?
Second, What are the key success factor and the competitive advantage of Korean firms in the global telecommunication exchange system business and which kinds of global technological strategies are needed in this business?
This thesis used the case study approach to examine research questions. First of all, this thesis reviewed the related literatures such as the concepts, competitive strategy, globalization, innovation model, technological acquisition, technological transfer and technological strategies. Next, this thesis reviewed the global telecommunication environment to verify the real situations of the telecommunication equipment providers. Third, it analyzed the stage of industry life cycle of TDX(Time Division Exchange) and some cases for the global activities of a large internationalized firm, After analyzing the cases, the major findings are as follows;
First, The current development stage of this industry is in the maturity stage, and technological innovation capability became a critical strategic factor of competition in this stage.
Second, The characteristic of this business must be CAP(Customer-Active Paradigm). because the telecommunication exchange system is the industrial products and usually its customer are the telecommunication service providers. So the non-pricing competitiveness are more important.
Third, This thesis finds that the multilocal strategy are more preferable than the global strategy, and the concentrating market entry strategy is preferably used to telecommunication systems enterring foreign market.
Forth, This thesis also finds that the defensive strategy and the safe-fail strategy fit for the global technological strategies.
Finally, Telecommunication exchange system frequently is transferred its technology to the less developed countries. And its technological transfer range has been expanded from manufacturing and installation to developing technologies possibly.
This is an exploratory study on the technological strategies of Korean firms in the global telecommunication exchange system business. The thesis contributes to provide the global technological strategies for the telecommunication firms of newly entering the foreign markets by considering environment and development process.
But this thesis has some shortcomings and requires in-depth studies. Because this is about a large telecommunication firm, the causal relationalship could not be explained explicitly. So it is necessary to compare with other companies' global technological strategies.
