Customer access and competitive certainty: performance effects in Swedish foreign subsidiaries.

• This article extends our understanding of performance effects of expansion barriers in different strategy contexts relevant to industrial firms. Effects of perceived obstacles to customer access are studied, and competitive certainty is acknowledged since barriers to a large extent originate from business strategies of competitors. • The study explores patterns using data from subsidiaries of Swedish manufacturing firms in Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States. For units with a narrow product/market scope, the direct performance effects of customer access obstacles and competitive certainty are negative. • On the other hand, in the narrow context competitive certainty moderates the relationship between customer access obstacles and performance, and this implicates a positive effect. There are no significant effects in the context of a broad product/market scope. • Performance effects of barriers are, thus, more complicated than previously thought, and we need to pay attention to perceived competitive certainty and the strategy context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]