Google: Google's degree of internationalization:

III – 6 Google's degree of internationalization:

Google has the following figures for the repartition of his offices around the world:

Northern America: 23

Europe: 22

Asia/Pacific: 15

Latin America: 3

Middle East: 5

Total=68

From those figures we could calculate the “International workforce ratio”: ((offices in the world-offices in the USA)/Total number of offices)*100= (48/68)*100= 70%.

However I think a more interesting ratio can be calculated. In fact a company can have a very high degree of internationalization but dividing his efforts in an unequal way.

For me we should take in account the degree of internationalization with the market itself. You can be very internationalized but being bad internationalized because you are in some places where the market is not.

Continent	Number of offices	% of offices	Perfect offices number	Perfect % of offices	World Internet users
Africa	1	1,50%	2	3,00%	3,50%
South America	2	3,00%	5	7,30%	7,10%
Central America	1	1,50%	1	1,50%	2,40%
North America	23	33,80%	12	17,64%	17,00%
Middle East	3	4,40%	2	3,00%	2,90%
Europe	23	33,80%	18	26,50%	26,30%
Asia	13	19,11%	27	39,70%	39,50%
Oceania	2	3,00%	1	1,50%	1,40%
	68	100,11%	68	100,14%	100,10%

As we can see here we have the repartition of Google's offices around the world and the % of Internet users around the world. The perfect offices number show how these offices should have been allocated.

In total: 1+3+11+1+5+14+1=36 offices could have been allocated better.

1+3+24=27 offices are lacking.

Google has then 41 offices which are well internationalized it equals to 68-27=41; 41/68= 60%.

A such rate signifies that Google is covering more than half of the planet and it is doing it in the more or less the right way...60% is strangely correlated to Google market shares around the world, is that a coincidence?

As a comparison his main competitor Yahoo has the following situation:

Continent	Number of offices	% of offices	Perfect offices number	Perfect % of offices	World Internet users
Africa	0	0,00%	1	3,50%	3,50%
South America	2	6,90%	2	6,90%	7,10%
Central America	1	3,50%	1	3,50%	2,40%
North America	4	13,80%	5	17,24%	17,00%
Middle East	0	0,00%	1	3,50%	2,90%
Europe	9	31,03%	8	27,60%	26,30%
Asia	12	41,40%	12	41,40%	39,50%
Oceania	1	3,50%	1	3,50%	1,40%
	29	100,13%	31	107,14%	100,10%

As we can see Yahoo allocated his workforce quite differently from Google. Yahoo focused on Asia whereas Google put most of his effort in North America.

This example has been chosen to show that it is a good thing to be internationalized but it is better if you are intelligently internationalized. If you put your effort in some countries where the market does not exist(this is the case for Australia) you will get nothing.