Internationalising business and reporting by geographical area

Internationalisation is a rational response to the threat posed by foreign competition. A company‟s development via internationalisation is not sufficient for long term profitability. Further changes are needed in management control that include management processes, organisational structure, reporting system, and Enterprise Resource Planning. This paper considers only changes related to the reporting system required to supply reports by geographical segment (both for management control and for external financial reporting). Disclosing reports per geographical segment increases the confidence of the financial markets and, thus, should reduce the cost of equity and interest rate of loans. After illustrating the concept of geographical subsystems, we discuss the advantages of space-time segmentation for the definition of operating segment by geographical areas, and the criteria used for segmentation.