The Research Of Chinese Relocating Listed Companies’ Location Choice Mechanism

Since 2000, Chinese companies have set off a wave of headquarters relocation. After many years of development, with the independence of the headquarters of the enterprises, the reselection of the headquarters location becomes an important part of the enterprise location strategy. To this end, a number of corporate headquarters with its core research and development departments, marketing departments carried out cross regional relocation, in order to achieve business again. Headquarters relocation also triggered widespread concern in the regional government. Not only to avoid local enterprises to relocate their headquarters, but also to attract headquarters to move in, the regional government had launched "clear the cage for new birds" policy and created a "headquarters economy" to achieve green development. Based on the analysis of the headquarters relocation cases of the listing corporation in China, the paper finds that the headquarters migration reflects the complex phenomenon of multi direction relocation and the coexistence of short-distance and long-distance relocation.In the academic field, there are two aspects of the research on the target location selection, which are relocating direction and relocating distance. As for the relocating direction, the scholars have carried out comparatively wide researches, but they are mainly based on the perspective of behavior choice, and put forward the external agglomeration-based theory, which is that the corporate headquarters tend to move to a better location, effectively explains the phenomenon of reverse relocation. However, the external agglomeration-based theory is difficult to explain the phenomenon of multi-direction relocation. In the area of relocating distance, the scholars’ researches are relatively less, which are mainly based on the perspective of behavior choice and put forward the proximity relocating-based view, which is that the corporate headquarters tend to move to the more recent alternative location. However, the proximity relocating-based view is difficult to explain the phenomenon of the coexistence of short-distance and long-distance relocation.Therefore, by incorporating network-based internationalization process theory, this paper takes the HQ relocating cases of Chinese listing corporations as sample to explore the mechanism of target location choice. Firstly, this paper verifies the applicability of the theory of external agglomeration and proximity relocating-based view. Secondly, the paper analyzes the main effect and the intermediary effect of the network model from the insight of behavioral choice to come up with the mechanism of the location selection. Finally, a case study is conducted to support the large sample statistical test.The results show that the listing corporations in China have two basic initial selection criteria, which are more benefit and less risk, and take bigger span of location advantage and less distance from where they move from as standards. In the actual process of relocation, the enterprises will take the location network embeddedness as the core path, in order to improve the location advantages of the enterprise in the target location, so that the benefit would be more and risk would be less. Therefore, the location network embeddedness of the enterprise affects the relationship of the span of location advantages and relocating distance with the target location choice as an intermediary variable, resulting in the phenomenon of the multi-direction relocation and the coexistence of short-distance and long-distance relocation. Finally, it is worth noting that for different types of enterprises, different types of location network embeddedness plays different roles. The location network embeddedness based on the location of the controlling shareholder plays the key role in target location choice of the M & A group of enterprises. However, for the non-M & A group of enterprises, the location network embeddedness based on the main business plays the key role. This study put forward the perspective of location choice of relocated headquarter as "rational choice logic as the drive and behavior decision logic as the core", promoting the preliminary integration of the two perspectives.