Story four
Entrepreneurial firms are pulling out of foreign markets at a rate not seen in two decades. Almost all of it gets reported as failure.
Firm trajectories of market presence over time. The bright traces retreat and return. These fields are generated, not plotted. Each draws one mark per observation in the study it belongs to and its structure mirrors the finding, but the coordinates are not measured values.
The idea
Withdrawal is often orchestration rather than defeat. Born-international ventures oscillate: entering, partially retreating, holding a service presence, re-entering when conditions turn. Treating market presence as binary loses the strategy entirely.
In the world right now
Coverage by journalists, regulators and research bodies — none of it produced by this research programme. It is included because it is the world the argument speaks to. Every item was checked against the live source.
Only 16 percent of more than 2,400 surveyed exporters reported rising export orders in Q2 2026, the weakest reading in two decades outside 2008 and the pandemic.
The headline is an average. Micro-exporters reported 11 percent against 26 percent for large firms, the dispersion this research traces to firm-level capability and cognition.
Thirty-six percent of UK trading SMEs saw US export turnover fall after new tariffs, and 27 percent actively cut their US exposure, shifting toward France and Germany.
Firms did not stop internationalising. They reallocated. Retreat from one market financed presence in another.
Nokia plans to cut most of its mainland China workforce and close sites in stages, retaining only after-sales services after more than forty years.
A partial withdrawal with a service presence retained. Binary entry-or-exit measures cannot represent this; oscillation can.
Roughly 18,000 discriminatory trade measures since 2020, with nearly two thirds of global trade inside value chains being reshaped by geopolitics.
The fragmentation backdrop for selective localisation and digital re-globalisation strategies.
The mechanism
The evidence
Peer-reviewed and accepted papers only. Work still under review is summarised below rather than listed, because a manuscript in review is not yet evidence of anything.
Two further manuscripts on re-internationalisation and adaptation under geopolitical fragmentation are under review or in preparation. Details follow publication.
So what
Judge a retreat by what is retained and how reversible it is, not by the exit itself. The same applies to evaluating regional export programmes.
Honestly
Oscillation is documented in configurational analyses of specific samples. Establishing how common the pattern is across populations, and which retreats are genuinely reversible rather than retrospectively framed as strategic, needs longitudinal data the current work does not have.