From Established to Emerging: Reconfiguring the Operating Model for an Electric Freight Firm’s Expansion into the UAE

Abstract

The road freight transition towards electrified and autonomous operations is increasingly being driven from emerging markets, where state-led infrastructure investment and aggressive decarbonisation targets create conditions for rapid deployment. For firms translating a mature home market operating model into such environments, existing internationalisation frameworks identify structural differences between markets at the firm and country level, but say little about how those differences should be addressed at the level of specific mechanisms. This thesis develops a structured procedure through which the operating-model reconfigurations required when a firm expands from an established home market into a foreign emerging market can be identified systematically rather than only observed retrospectively. It applies this procedure to a freight technology firm undergoing such an expansion, in order to examine how the operating model is reconfigured. The empirical setting is the case company’s UAE deployment, contrasted against its European baseline. The European configuration was developed through nine semi structured interviews with operations staff and a pre interview priority survey, while the UAE configuration was developed through a workshop with the local Operations Lead, supplemented by PESTEL based secondary research. Both were structured cell by cell through the Slack and Lewis (2020) operations strategy matrix. The assessment produced five distinct types of reconfiguration: structural redesign, mixed adaptation, temporal convergence, market-driven intensification and transfer amplification. The central finding is that operating model translation is not a binary choice between standardisation and adaptation, but a layered process in which different elements undergo different kinds of reconfiguration depending on host market conditions, operational maturity, and organisational embedding. The procedure developed to surface these patterns is designed to be replicable across home and host market pairs and across sectors, and serves as an analytical bridge between operations strategy theory and the internationalisation literature by combining the Slack and Lewis matrix with PESTEL-based market analysis in a structured way.