The last four chapters have examined leading firms in four sectors: retail; banking; chemicals; and automobiles. In total, a set of twenty-three firms has been considered across these four sectors. Only one of these firms (LVMH) is global; seven are bi-regional, and the remaining thirteen are home based. In this chapter another twenty-two firms will be profiled. These firms come from all these three major classifications: there are ten home-region firms; six bi-regionals; three global; plus two “near miss” global firms; and one host-region case. In this chapter, corporate strategy and structure of these well-known firms, as well as the performance of these firms, will be analyzed using publicly available information.

We are particularly interested in the extent to which each firm has a regional or global scope in its geographic sales (as shown by its classification in chapter 2) and the extent to which its FSAs have a home-region or global reach. We will later analyze each of these twenty-two firms (plus the twenty-three from the preceding four chapters) in terms of the regional matrix of figure 10.2 in the next chapter. chapter 10, indeed, will serve as a summary chapter with the strategic positioning of each of the forty-five firms studied in detail in this book, plus a further five, for a total of fifty detailed case studies.