Turkish hiddenchampions

The increasing internationalization of emerging economies is attracting researchers attention. However the existing studies focuses particularly on large corporations (Ramamurti and Singh, 2009), ignoring the role of small and medium sized firms in the internationalization process. Simon (2009) shows for Germany, Austria and Switzerland that the major international firms that carry out the significant part of exports are not large firms but small and medium sized firms. For example, Germany has 1262 hidden champions that are named so because of their success by being one of the top three market leaders in their targeted market but at the same time for not being well recognized by general public (Simon, 2009). According to the Simon’s classification, these champion firms correspond to 70% of exports in the country. An intriguing question is to investigate this kind of champions in developing countries in order to find out what makes them so competitive in international markets. This paper aims to do this by concentrating in one emerging economy: Turkey.