Cross-border acquisitions by emerging economies multinational enterprises (EMNEs) have attracted significant academic attention. The World Investment Report 2014 suggests that acquisitions of foreign firms by multinational enterprises from emerging economies have contributed significantly towards their share of global outward foreign direct investment (FDI) flows which reached 39% in 2013 (UNCTAD, 2014). Examining EMNE acquisition of foreign firms, a growing body of literature suggests that EMNEs prefer to undertake FDIthrough acquisitions because it aids them in catching up with MNEs from industrially advanced economies (Awate, Larsen, & Mudambi, 2012; Bonaglia, Goldstein, & Mathews, 2007; Duysters, Jacob, Lemmens, & Jintian, 2009; Mathews & Zander, 2007; Mathews, 2002, 2006; Young, Huang, & McDermott,1996), and helps to augment strategic assets needed to create value and build competitive advantages for future growth (Deng, 2009; Gubbi, Aulakh, Ray, Sarkar, & Chittoor, 2009,Luo & Tung, 2007; Sun, Peng, Ren, & Yan, 2012).

This evolving body of literature seems to ignore the fact that cross border acquisition involves inherent risks and that the EMNEs need to have significant knowledge to manage the issues involved in undertaking acquisitions. Thus, the literature offers plausible explanations for the motivations and strategies behind acquisitions but there is a limited understanding of the antecedents for acquisitions undertaken by EMNEs. We contribute to the scholarship on EMNEs’ internationalization through crossborder acquisition by addressing pertinent questions raised in the call for papers for this special issue (Aulakh, Kundu, & Lahiri, 2013), i.e. “How do [EMNEs] learn and build knowledge from their prior internationalization moves out of their home markets? What strategies and structures do they employ to use existing knowledge (Peng, 2012)?” We show that the combination of in-house resources with experiential market knowledge and externally sourced technological knowledge, facilitates cross-border acquisitions by the EMNE. Experiential market knowledge helps the EMNE to identify constraints and opportunities for acquisition in host markets, while externally sourced technological knowledge augments the technological competence of the EMNE.