Investigation of factors influencing on export development in SMEs

Internationalization of commerce and globalization of markets have become common in the recent decade. Companies try to sell their products all over the world and maximize their profits. Export development is a way to internationalize companies' activities. With export, companies can offer their products in external markets with the least involvement in local markets
The present research aims at evaluation of factors influencing on export development in SMEs in Ardebil Province, Iran and tries to investigate the influence of factors like:competition in internal market, company size, products packaging, manager's skill in destination country language and elimination of procedural obstacles on export development. Its methodology is applied, in terms of its goal and it is a descriptivecorrelation research in terms of data collection method. Its statistical population included active companies situated in Ardebil industrial estates (264 companies) and 157 companies were elected as sample size by means of Morgan table and simple random sampling. Data collection was done by a questionnaire which was prepared using previous studies and researcher's opinions and its validity and reliability was verified. Chronbach's alpha was used to investigate the questionnaire's reliability (alpha=0.7) and structural equations modeling method was used to analyze data. verification factor analysis was used to show that competition in internal market, company size, products packaging, manager's skill in destination country language and elimination of procedural barriers have influence on export development and the influence is significant and positive.