Global Business: The Key Role of Quality Management as a Tool to Reach Long Term International Trade

To be prepared for the international market, a company needs to conquer a high level of trust among its trade partners overseas, high levels of quality conquered in its products and services can become an important asset. As an example it can be examined the international trade of fruit. As a highly perishable product, fruit are suitable to biological, physical and chemical hazards. All these risks are higher when fruit are transacted in international trade. In this case fruit suppliers and fruit buyers are exposed to elevated transaction costs, since both sides need to deal with questions like product specifications, post-harvest processing and logistics. Quality management can be employed in order to organize all production, processing and logistics operations. In this paper the aim was to verify if producers, exporters and importers of fruit are making use of quality management concepts in order to reduce risks and transaction costs. As investigation method, semi-structured interviews were conducted in Brazil and UK. The results of the interviews support the idea that quality consciousness is fundamental in the fruit trade. The majority of companies approached in the research were shown not to perceive as a problem, the several parameters that affect the quality of the final product. In other words, the results suggest that firms that are incapable of handling quality issues satisfactorily find little place in the fruit trade. Quality management concepts are commonly employed in order to guarantee product specifications and rationality in the operation processes and by doing so, it contributes to reduce transactions costs between the trading parties.