International Strategic Alliances in the Iranian Home Appliance Industry: A Model of the Perceived Risks for Foreign Partners

Attracting foreign investment is one of the most important policies of the Iranian government for improving economic conditions. Nevertheless, despite the government and the Ministry of Industry's emphasis as well as the efforts of Iranian companies to attract foreign partners, this is less common in Iranian home appliance industry, which indicates the risks for foreign investors. Accordingly, the present study aims to identify and model the risks that foreign investors face through a Strategic Alliance with local companies in the Iranian home appliance industry. Hence, the Strategic Alliance risks are investigated through semi-structured interviews with 20 industry experts and the use of qualitative content analysis, and next, the extracted factors are validated by the academic and industry experts' views using Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA). The final model is proposed using Interpretive Structural Modeling (ISM). The research results demonstrate 9 major risk factors in the formation stage, 13 risk factors in operational stage and 6 risk factors in the termination stage of strategic alliance lifecycle. One of the significant findings of this study is that the political, legal and economic risks of Iran are the main risk factors for foreign companies in all three stages of strategic alliance lifecycle in Iran.