The Impact of Digital Transformation on International Trade and Global Business Performance
Keywords:
digital transformation, international trade, global business performance, e-commerce adoption, digital marketing, supply chain digitalizationAbstract
Digital transformation has transformed the way companies plan, implement and manage cross-border business, and now plays a key role in international trade and global business performance is the topic that managers, policymakers and scholars are constantly worried about. This paper investigates how digital transformation through five dimensions — digital infrastructure readiness, e-commerce adoption, digital marketing capability, data analytics capability and supply chain digitalization — influences the overall performance of internationally trading companies worldwide. A structured questionnaire using five-point likert scale was used to gather data from 200 SMEs involved in export activities from manufacturing, services and trading activities. Descriptive statistics, Cronbach's alpha reliability test, Pearson correlation, one way ANOVA and multiple linear regression were performed with SPSS version 27. All reliability coefficients were above 0.70, indicating good internal consistency. The regression results reveal that digital infrastructure readiness, e-commerce adoption and digital marketing capability significantly and positively explain global business performance, along with the other two predictors accounting for 55.1 per cent of the variance, while data analytics capability and supply chain digitalization did not reach significance once the other predictors were controlled for. The differences in the global business performance between firms with respect to size and to industry sector were both statistically significant. The results indicated that the impact of digital transformation on trade performance varies by dimension, with the impact of market-oriented digital capabilities greater than the impact of back-end digitalization at this stage. The study provides suggestions for export-oriented companies, trade promotion organizations, and policy makers aiming to improve the competitiveness of exporting companies digitally.
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