 In this topic, we are going to discuss the stages of internationalization step, the export department and what type of structure does export department have. We are talking about the stages of internationalization and in that we are going to individually discuss each stage and this is the export department stage. At this stage, your organization is operating production facilities in home country and you are exporting your products or services to foreign countries and you don't have any other operations in the foreign country. You are only exporting your products or services outside the foreign country. In this diagram, you can see that this is an organizational structure. There is this corporate executive head. Then there are the departments of an organization and each department is headed by one manager. So there is finance department with a finance manager, logistics department with a logistics manager, production department with the production manager. There is a marketing department and there is human resource department both with their individual managers. Now at this stage, you are only selling in a foreign country. Therefore, in the organizational structure, your international operations will fall under the marketing manager as you are only selling. So you can see in this diagram that under the marketing manager, one is the domestic sales manager and the other one is the international sales manager. And this international sales manager would be housed in your parent country. This international sales manager will not be operating in any other country. He will only be responsible for selling in the foreign country. So your international sales manager would be looking after all your exports and your domestic sales manager will be looking after your domestic sales. It is possible that a firm is only exporting outside. There are some firms who do not sell in their parent country. Their export business is so wide and their sales are so good that they do not sell in their parent country. So it is possible that in the organizational structure, you are only the international sales manager and not the domestic sales manager. In this, you can see that the human resource issues and their roles and responsibilities are in a dotted line with a circle. So that means that the roles and responsibilities of HR, the human resource management, they are not much different and they are quite vague as they relate to the difference between the international and the domestic context. So you don't need to be doing much at this stage. At this stage, the human resource manager will not be concerned with internationalization or he will not be concerned with the international issues as there will not be any human resources working in another country. So they will not be concerned with expatriate management or concerns or issues related with international human resource management. So there will not be much concern about that. Initially, this is the first stage of a manufacturing concern. The manufacturing concern starts with its international operations. They start with exporting first of all and then they go for the next stages. Services organization, this is a tricky stage because services, they have to be provided on the spot. For example, if you have a chain of saloons, for example, Tony and Guy, you cannot operate without providing those services in the particular environment at a particular stage. So you can't go into exports in a services sector. But with technological advances, with technological opportunities with the IT and the internet becoming so efficient and so available and accessible, now the services also have got the possibility of being exported or being sold in a foreign environment without being actually present over there. For example, you have seen that you can consult with online doctors. Similarly, in education, you have the example of your own university that the instructor does not have to be present at that particular place to deliver that service. With the emerging opportunities coming with the IT, the services sector can also go for this stage of exporting stage just like the manufacturing department. At this stage, the HR department does not need to go through a major transformation until international sales, they reach a critical point. When your international sales reach that critical point, then you have to go for an evolutionary step. You have to go for modifying the operations of your organization and go for the next step in your internationalization process. So this is how an export department operates in the international context.