Diploma Thesis from the year 2003 in the subject Economics - International Economic Relations, grade: 1,5 , Heidenheim University of Cooperative Education, course: International Business Studies , language: English, abstract: The globalization of today's market place has been subject to great attention. Whether or not a company participates directly in international business, hardly anyone can claim not to be involved in any way in the global market place. In fact, due to saturation tendencies in the domestic market, the dependency on international customers as well as the ever increasing pace of global competition, nearly all companies of any size and business level are faced with the impacts of the world market. Their performance, however, differs significantly. Especially for SMEs foreign expansion is the main challenge; minor foreign market knowledge, inexperienced staff and the dependency on day-to-day operations limit the possibilities for a systematic approach to foreign markets. In the literature of international marketing and management there is a variety of theoretical approaches concerning the process of internationalisation respectively the entry into foreign markets as well as market development. However, in many cases especially Small and Medium Sized Enterprises (SMEs) fail to interpret the theoretical approaches according to their needs and thus are confronted with a considerable gap between theory and their business reality. Being employed in a SME myself missing strategic planning and emotional decision-making has indeed been a part of my work experience during my cooperative studies. In my company I am now responsible as Area Sales Manager for the Scandinavian region, Austria and the United Kingdom and it will be my task to correlate the indications of theory with the necessities of the specific internal reality of my job assignment. As the company has started to re-organise export activities, the development of the British extraction technology market is a given task and at the same time the subject of my dissertation.