Technologically evolving industrial equipment fabricators: their foreign involvement

In the United States fabrication shops build equipment to client specifications. Once their growth and profitability were closely aligned with those of their clients who were generally the larger firms. Now that most of these clients import their needs from abroad, fabrication shops need to compete on their own in both domestic and foreign markets. In order to help them achieve their goal, we need to have some understanding of their internal development and further identify possible barriers to their foreign involvement. To this end, a conceptual model with several operational and planning variables, to discriminate fabrication shops that service foreign markets from those that do not, is postulated and empirically tested. Policy implications of the study findings are discussed briefly. Limitations of the statistical procedures and possible future work are outlined.