An Analysis of the Offshoring Decision Process: The Influence of the Company's Size

Nowadays, many firms of all sizes are offshoring part of their production and procurement. Despite this fact, few studies deal with the offshoring decision process in the context of small- to- medium sized enterprises (SMEs).In order to understand the influence of the firm's size on this process, we conducted a survey among 158 French companies, and showed that SMEs offshore about the same part of their procurement than bigger organizations, but that they concentrate their operations on less countries. We also demonstrated that SMEs have less access to information about distant countries, and, as a consequence, that their offshoring processes are less planned that those of bigger companies.