The International Freight Forwarding Enterprises In China's Foreign Direct Investment

As the international trade in our country has grown rapidly, freight forwarding industry is becoming a new developing service industry. By the end of 2002, over 3500 freight forwarding companies have been setup. However, our own freight forwarders are uncompetitive compared with foreign freight forwarders. What's more, as our country enters WTO, this industry will be totally open to foreign forwarders in five years. So in this situation, how to handle this problem and increase our competitiveness is very important to our own freight forwarders' further development.According to successful foreign forwarders' experience, a well organized business network around the world is key to the freight forwarding business. So foreign direct investment (FDI) will become an important issue for our forwarders. This paper is based on this issue and focused on the freight forwarding development from a globalization and integration perspective. And this paper is trying to find a new way for our freight forwarding development.The first part introduces the current situations of freight forwarding and its development in the world and in China.The second part analyzes the essence of FDI, based on traditional FDI theories. And concludes that our corporations' FDI is motivated by economic globalization and based on expanding corporate resources and aimed at acquiring creative assets. The current multinational corporation theories have lots of limits in explaining our corporation's FDI practice.The third part tries to discuss theories that can be applied to explain our freight forwarders' FDI and mainly focus on the necessity and strength of our freight forwarders' FDI and show that our freight forwarders is necessary and possible to realize FDI and get stronger in the global competition.The fourth part makes some tentative research on the FDI strategies andanalyzes the FDF s district selection and involvement models and in the end generalizes the strategies that our freight forwarders may choose.The paper tries to make some research and analysis of theories, feasibility, strength and strategies for our freight forwarders' FDI and hopes to help these corporations to find new way for their developments.