Departamento de Economía

This paper is part of a broader line of research, as is the analysis of the cork business in Spain in the last two decades, over which there is an alarming lack of studies, focusing particularly on a regional view. This analysis seeks to establish whether it still meets today the territorial distribution and products that the classical works showed for the entire twentieth century. It concludes, still provisional, that, if we consider the export statistics of cork products, there have been major changes in the Extremadura cork industry specialization, which today has ceased to have the focus in semimanufactured products to become a stronghold bastion of the Spanish cork industry.

This research analyzes the cork industry in southern European countries, which constitute the main and last stronghold of the historic cork manufacturing in the world. The analysis, made from an economic history approach, pays special attention to three aspects. The first one is the cork industry location, including changes that have occurred in it over the last century, which has led to a cork international geography very different from that existing at the beginning of the twentieth century. The second one is how to organize production in cork manufacturing in the last century, which has led to the proliferation of industrial districts or clusters in the sector in all countries where cork industry has survived. The study of these “industrial agglomerations” is crucial to explain the competitive advantages that agglomerated companies have, being this one of the objectives of the research. Finally, the third aspect is the life cycle of the cork industry, whose analysis is very important to understand where it is today, both in general and in each of the territories studied.

Las trayectorias de internacionalización seguidas por las empresas familiares se pueden ver desde varios enfoques teóricos: fases del proceso de internacionalización; iniciativa empresarial internacional, la perspectiva sociológica, la teoría de la empresa familiar. Una perspectiva histórica de las empresas familiares internacionalizadas, que permita la integración de estos enfoques, es útil para una comprensión profunda del proceso de internacionalización de los diferentes sectores y países. El propósito de este trabajo es identificar los factores que facilitan o restringen el camino de la internacionalización de las empresas familiares, teniendo en cuenta sus ventajas competitivas, la estructura y la gestión de la propiedad, la innovación y los activos intangibles y otros factores relevantes, internos y/o externos a la firma. En este estudio se hace un análisis de más de un siglo de dos empresas que actúan en el negocio del corcho en España y Portugal: La Mundet (Setúbal) cerrada en la década de 1980 y Amorim & Irmãos (Aveiro) que se convirtió y es la compañía líder en el negocio del corcho a nivel mundial. La cuidadosa comparación de estas dos historias, una de fracaso y la otra de éxito, permite una identificación precisa de los factores determinantes de una internacionalización exitosa. Es útil para la comprensión de varias características de ambas empresas, con aspectos similares aunque con grandes diferencias, permitiendo el examen de varias hipótesis en el contexto de la aproximación teórica a la internacionalización de las empresas familiares. Ambas son empresas familiares que operan en el mismo negocio, y desde su origen se han orientado a los mercados extranjeros, su historia se fue a lo largo de gran parte del siglo XX y por lo tanto se enfrentó a limitaciones nacionales e internacionales similares, y sus opciones de ubicación eran diferentes y la región elegida ha influido en su devenir.

The history of the cork business in the frontier town of San Vicente de Alcántara (Badajoz) has led to the formation of an industrial district, which has provided a competitive advantage to the companies that constitute it. Today, in a context of global economic crisis, and more specifically, in a context of crisis in the cork business, the decline in terms of employment and number of companies in this region has forced employers to look for solutions. In this situation, it has been promoted the full institutionalization of the cork industrial district with the
main objective of correcting the main limitations of the Extremadura cork industry, such as (1) the high specialization in the first stages of cork manufacturing, and (2) the lack of markets diversification at national
and international levels. In this paper, we show the steps that have been taken by the cork industry in San Vicente de Alcántara for the formation of the industrial district.