What Worked at Home Didn’t Work Abroad
Seven companies. Seven countries. A combined century or so of learning the same lesson: what works at home doesn’t automatically work abroad, it just fails more expensively because you weren’t watching for it.
eBay, USA, to China
eBay entered China in 2002 by buying EachNet, the local auction site, then ran it largely as an outpost of the US business. Little was adapted beyond the language. Alibaba’s Taobao undercut eBay’s listing fees, switched from auctions to fixed prices Chinese shoppers could act on immediately, and solved the one problem eBay never touched, trust between strangers, by building in a chat tool so buyers could question sellers before paying. Jack Ma put it best: “eBay may be a shark in the ocean, but I am a crocodile in the Yangtze River.” By 2006 eBay had effectively retreated from the market, and Taobao went on to dominate Chinese C2C ecommerce.
Domino’s, USA, to Italy
Domino’s opened in Milan in 2015 aiming for 880 Italian restaurants by 2030. It closed its last one in August 2022, having reached about 29. Delivery apps such as Glovo, Deliveroo and Just Eat expanded fast enough to erase Domino’s main advantage, and the product itself never landed. American-style menu items such as Hawaiian pizzas struggled to resonate in a market already saturated with local alternatives. When the closure was announced, Italian social media’s reaction was closer to told-you-so than surprise.
Vodafone, UK, to Japan
Vodafone bought into Japan’s mobile market through J-Phone, then sold the business to SoftBank in 2006 for around $15 billion, taking a £28 billion write-down on the way out. The handsets it offered were behind what NTT DoCoMo and KDDI already had on shelves. The 3G rollout was widely viewed as disappointing and left Vodafone behind local competitors. Its main marketing push was built around international roaming, a feature that mattered to a sliver of its Japanese customers. Management decisions were often criticised for insufficient understanding of local market requirements, and headquarters expected profitability on a timeline the market never supported.
Media Markt, Germany, to China
Media Markt entered China around 2010 and lasted three years. By the time it closed its seven Shanghai stores in March 2013, it was generating under five per cent of what local rival Suning made from over a thousand more locations. The European format, showroom-style browsing, staff-led advice, a price-match guarantee, backfired in a market where shoppers already used stores to browse before buying cheaper elsewhere online. Metro Group, its parent, decided the hundreds of millions of euros a year needed to compete on price wasn’t worth spending.
Marks & Spencer, UK, to Canada
Marks & Spencer entered Canada in 1973 and operated there until its exit in 1998. While the chain grew to several dozen stores, the precise store count and financial performance figures often cited in commentary are inconsistently sourced. Many analysts have suggested that one of the underlying issues was a retail offer that increasingly reflected UK tastes, cuts and sizing, with limited adaptation to evolving Canadian consumer preferences. The result was a long, gradual decline rather than a sharp failure. The kind of slow drift that can persist for years before anyone asks the obvious strategic questions.
Auchan, France, to Italy
Auchan spent decades running hypermarkets in Italy before selling the lot, dozens of stores, to Conad in 2019. There was no single dramatic misstep. It simply never built the scale to beat Italian domestic chains on their own ground, a reminder that market entry failure doesn’t always look like a crisis. Sometimes it looks like forty years of quietly not winning.
Etihad, UAE, equity stakes in Airberlin and Alitalia
Etihad took a different route into Europe altogether: rather than building or acquiring outright, it bought minority stakes in airberlin (Germany) and Alitalia (Italy), betting it could fix them from the boardroom. Both airlines carried structural problems Etihad’s capital couldn’t solve, high costs, weak route networks, entrenched unions, and both collapsed. Etihad wrote off more than a billion dollars on the two investments combined. The lesson here is different from the rest: sometimes the market itself isn’t the problem, the partner is, and no amount of due diligence on the country fixes a bad bet on the company.
The pattern
Different countries, different products, different routes in, buying, building, investing. What’s consistent is that in every case, the company had capital, ambition and a working model somewhere else, and assumed that was most of the job. It’s rarely one big mistake. It’s usually several small, easy-to-wave-away ones: pricing logic, format, trust, timeline, or the partner across the table. That’s the part a feasibility study tends to miss, and the part worth an outside read on before the ink dries, not after.
