In the past decades, small and medium enterprises (SMEs) have played important roles in the Taiwanese economic development history. Till this moment SMEs are still a major contributor in Taiwanese economy and they are still playing an important role as supply chain members and partners for Taiwanese multinational enterprises (MNCs). Due to nowadays the global environment changes so quickly, more and more competition is coming from worldwide especially from emerging countries or developing countries. These competition and challenges are more severe and totally different from the competition in the early years. Especially, Taiwan is a just small island country owning a very small domestic market, probably the best way for Taiwanese SMEs to compete with worldwide competitors is to invest internationally and then try to utilize foreign resource like foreign human resource, natural resource and money capital. Besides investing internationally, SMEs should also pay more attention on market orientation, especially on the aspect of customer and competitor and also try to utilize guanxi networks to gain more resource from domestic government or foreign countries. However, research on this issue is limited and deserves further evaluation. Thus, this study focuses on how “customer-related responsiveness and competitor-related responsiveness” influence SMEs’ internationalization and how internationalization orientation influences guanxi networks and firms’ performance. In addition, one moderator, “entrepreneurial orientation” is proposed to examine the influences of competitor-related responsiveness on internationalization” and on business performance.”
The data was collected from 153 companies and these respondents are all SMEs in Taiwan. In addition, these survey companies are all doing international business like exporting, etc.
The results of this study are summarized as follows: (1) Customer-related responsiveness has significantly influence on outward internationalization, especially for the information generation, dissemination and customer orientation of the affective organizational system. Customer-related responsiveness has significant influence on inward internationalization, especially for information dissemination. (2) Customer-related responsiveness has significant influence on non-financial performance, especially for the information dissemination and customer orientation of the affective organizational system. Customer-related responsiveness has significant influence on financial performance, especially for the information generation and information analysis. (3) Competitor-related responsiveness has significant influence on outward internationalization, especially for the information generation. Competitor-related responsiveness has significant influence on inward internationalization, especially for competitor orientation of the affective organizational system. (4) Competitor-related responsiveness has significant influence on non-financial performance, especially for information analysis. Competitor-related responsiveness has significant influence on financial performance, especially for information storage. (5) Internationalization has significant influence on domestic guanxi networks, especially for inward internationalization. Internationalization has significant influence on foreign guanxi networks, especially for outward and inward internationalization. (6) Guanxi networks have significant influence on non-financial performance, especially for domestic guanxi networks. Guanxi networks have significant influence on financial performance, especially for domestic guanxi networks. (7) EO has moderating effect for the influence of cognitive organizational system of competitor orientation on inward internationalization. (8) Innovativeness of EO has moderating effect for the influence of cognitive organizational system of competitor orientation on non-financial performance. Proactiveness of EO has moderating effect for the influence of cognitive organizational system and non-financial performance.

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