- 著者
-
松本 茂
- 出版者
- 日本経営学会
- 雑誌
- 日本経営学会誌 (ISSN:18820271)
- 巻号頁・発行日
- vol.47, pp.3-16, 2021 (Released:2022-09-21)
- 参考文献数
- 21
Japanese enterprises began to expand into overseas markets in earnest at the beginning of the 21st century. This may be considered to be inevitable due to the simultaneous maturation of Japan's domestic market and development of emerging markets; the average ratio of manufacturing companies' foreign sales has been rising continuously during this time, reaching almost 40% in fiscal 2017. Japanese companies have been struggling with the issue of low profitability since the previous century; however, it is a question whether increasing the ratio of foreign sales helps resolve this problem. This paper uses financial data from fiscal 2001 through fiscal 2016 to analyze how the degree of reliance on foreign markets affects profitability. Examining data on a sample of 8,435 companies over 16 years, we observed a positive correlation between profitability and the ratio of foreign sales to total sales, which represents the degree of reliance on foreign markets. However, using a regression analysis to control for the effects of variables such as growth rate of sales and asset turnover ratio, the ratio of foreign sales is shown to negatively impact profitability at a significance level of 1%. Furthermore, when we divide the total sample for each year from fiscal 2001 through fiscal 2016 into two equal groups, based on their degree of reliance on foreign sales, there was a difference in profitability between the group with high ratio of foreign sales and the group with low ratio of foreign sales. For the group with low ratio of foreign sales, we confirmed more significant negative causality between profitability and ratio of foreign sales. On the surface, Japanese companies' overseas operations may appear to contribute to their growth and profitability, but, in fact, it is apparent that this is not the case with regard to their profits.