LEVERAGING BUSINESS RELATIONSHIPS AS SMES INTERNATIONALIZATION DRIVERS

The current paper is intended to draw on business relationships as drivers of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) internationalization processes. Five major factors of business relationships were assessed in terms of their influence on European metal wholesalers' internationalization, namely: intercultural openness, context exploitation, psychological proximity, credibility and specialized networks. Placing the discussion in the framework of business sustainability, the inferred hypotheses were assessed using partial least squares structural equation modeling. 107 managers in the field took part at the questioned-based survey, sharing their viewpoints on the dynamics of international business relationships. As the findings show, over 55% of the variance in business internationalization was explained by the considered factors.