Analysis of the Competitiveness of Hungarian Companies from the Perspective of Internationalisation
Authors:   , Szanyi-Gyenes Xénia 
Published: February 2024

Research on competitiveness and internationalisation of companies is a critical academic field. There are infinite numbers of studies which investigate how to improve SME competitiveness, the impact of SME internationalisation on innovation, SMEs international performance, or the digital transformation of SMEs. Innovation is decisive for market competitiveness and efficiency and some research show that European SME innovations can rarely be seen as pioneering or groundbreaking. My research focuses of domestic small and medium-sized enterprises. In some research, recurring success factors can be identified (Berényi & Deutsch, 2021). In my early research, I investigated the importance of the SME sector (Szanyi-Gyenes, Mudri & Bakosné Böröcz, 2015; Szanyi-Gyenes, 2019), factors of a successful international growth of a small company (Szanyi-Gyenes, 2017), later on the management and the management’s attitude in the company’s success (Szanyi-Gyenes & Almási, 2021), future competitiveness aspects of domestic companies from the internationalisation perspective (Marciniak et al., 2022), the digitalization factors of domestic companies from the internationalisation and competitiveness perspective (Szanyi-Gyenes & Almási, 2023) and the effects of internal barriers of domestic companies on competitiveness. The research model describe how the competitiveness, the internationalisation dimension, and the role of the company’s manager are linked. The role of leadership is crucial to success, the reason is that strategic orientation, recognition of growth options, resource management, creating a mission-friendly organisational structure are all leadership capacities in the SME sector. Results has shown that managers and employees of enterprises have a diverse perception and evaluation of the performance of their enterprise, and that the concept of success is more complex and contains elements based on perceptions. The manager’s attitude towards success significantly determines the strategic orientation of the enterprise, the attention and resources devoted to specific areas of operation. Examining companies operating in the international market and those operating only in the domestic market, companies present on the international market showed better scores in all the dimensions examined. They are characterised by continuous strategic renewal, a strategy broken down to the individual level, the use of technological innovation and openness to innovation. The leadership style is also supportive of strategic objectives and the 2 transformational leadership style is more typical. These companies are constantly seeking to maintain a competitive edge through new strategic initiatives, have a more individualised strategic plan, have a well-defined and known decision-making process, incorporate available information into the decision-making process, have responded more effectively to unexpected environmental challenges in times of pandemics, are more attentive to the use of digital technologies and perform better in terms of workflow efficiency. The results show that technological changes, including the challenges of digitalization, are more challenging for larger companies and have the least impact on companies after the early period. Companies should be more open to innovation and digitalization, to develop employees’ skills and suggest management support and risk taking. Companies that are also present in the international market perceive the impact of technology, including digitalization, as stronger and pay more attention to the use of digital technologies, compared to domestic companies that perceive the impact of technological change as less of a challenge. These companies perform better in improving work process efficiency, identifying new practices and allocating resources accordingly. Digitalization can become a key to the future success of a company if managers change their management style and decision-making mechanisms. Finally, focusing on barriers to competitiveness shows, that inhibiting factor is clearly linked to internationalisation too. Firms also present on the international market are likely to have the necessary specialised expertise, such as sales knowledge, and thus perceive expertise as less relevant as a barrier. To be more competitive, it is recommended to look for strategic opportunities where companies can be involved in international processes, thus making the organisation more open to innovation, new opportunities can bring more effective operation, employees will be more motivated, thus reducing the impact of inhibiting factors.