As globalization becomes a necessity for organizations to continue their sustainability and existence in the world, naturally their interdependencies to other economies also emerge. After the 2008 economic crisis, TEMSA, a Turkish family-owned company operating in the transportation industry, decided to expand its products and manufacturing plants to different regions. Egypt, for the time being, was geographically a well strategic location for TEMSA's long-term manufacturing plans. In 2011, when the Arab Spring broke out, TEMSA found itself in the middle of chaos, challenged by external political and economic decisions. This chapter focuses on the case study of TEMSA Global as they entered the Egyptian market with a foreign direct investment and managing chaos between the years 2011-2012. An interview was conducted with the management team on duty at the time to collect data. As a result, it was observed that TEMSA potentially had a chance to continue its operations in the Egyptian market if the Arabian Spring had not happened. Chaos is a potential enemy for FDIs as they seek stability.
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As technology develops and transforms people, companies, and even governments want to aim higher and expand limits (Dinçer, Yüksel, Adalı & Aydın, 2019; Yüksel, 2017). It is much easier to communicate with the world as technology and innovations create great opportunities (Dinçer, Yüksel & Martínez, 2019; Dinçer, Yüksel & Çetiner, 2019). In the last decade, technology and mainly the Internet has visited everyone’s home, creating more demands from a customer’s perspective. Just like any other change in history, organizations have to adapt to the fast speed of wants and needs of their customers (Dinçer & Yüksel, 2018a).
The world has diverse needs and therefore companies try to keep up to date with the ongoing change. Companies, which operate in limited economies eventually, seek for international markets to expand (Ciravegna, 2018; Dinçer & Yüksel, 2018b). Some take on the risk depending on their resources and hopefully strategically plan their globalization journey (Dinçer, Yüksel & Pınarbaşı, 2019). When companies decide to enter the international markets, some critical steps are required be taken in order to guarantee strategic positioning (Dinçer, Hacıoğlu & Yüksel, 2017). The initial stage is to analyze the external environment of the host country (Kucuksuleymanoglu, 2008; Dinçer, Yüksel & Adalı, 2019). Depending on the vision of the company, and the macro/micro factors, organizations can shape how and when they will enter the international market. Although sometimes it is not possible to foresee situations, especially political events, companies still take the potential calculated risk by directly investing in a foreign developing country (Tunay et al., 2019).
Foreign direct investments (FDI) along with different alternatives to enter international markets seems to be the most effective approach (Calabrese & Manello, 2018; Adalı & Yüksel, 2017). After World War II, countries tend to be very skeptical in regards to FDI (Dinçer, Hacıoğlu &Yüksel, 2018). It was viewed as a trap to colonialism, especially in developing countries (Tandircioglu, 2003; Zengin et al., 2018). Therefore, it could be said that countries were reluctant to the idea of outside investments (Yüksel et al., 2017). However, technology developments and the need to catch-up with globalization changed perspectives in both developed and developing economies (Jain, et.al., 2018; Uzunkaya et al., 2019; Dinçer et al., 2019). Eventually, governments needed to compete to strenghten their economies to sit on the powerful platform. According to Cinko, there are different motivations of FDI (See Appendix 1Table 1).