The Table 5.

1 also shows that the majority of the importers in this sample have
graduate and postgraduate qualifications (87.50%). It is revealed that the respondents
are varied widely in terms of their age. The highest representatives of the respondents
(41.60%) are from the age group of 36 to 45 followed by a relatively young
generation below 35 years of age (36%).

As reported in Table 5.1, the average year of respondents’ experience of importing is

12.38 years. Most of the respondents in this sample (about 82%) had more than five
years of business experience. This may indicate that the respondents are experienced
in the field of international business. In terms of job position of the respondents,
around three-quarters of the key informants in the survey held key decision-making
positions either as Owner Manager, Managing Director/Director/Chief Executive or
as General Manager/Manager of the firm (71.76%). In addition, a significant number
of Commercial Officers/Executives of the firm (24.81) who are playing a key role
within the importing firms also participated in this survey. The key informants’
overall position within the firm signifies the high profile participation in the survey
that added to the data quality (Kim and Frazier, 1997).
Md._Abu_Saleh_Thesis 2006
Firm characteristics are an integral part of analysis to categorise the participating
firms. However, as noted earlier, 12.6% of the importing firms were involved in both
industrial and commercial importing and they are categorised into the commercial
importer category for their major emphasis on that trade. In order to verify the group
difference in responses, t-tests for all (51) items were conducted. The results show
that there is no significant difference between the responses of industrial and
commercial importers for 47 items. However, two trust items and one item each in
‘transaction-specific investment’ and ‘environmental volatility’ show a marginally
significant difference between the responses of the two groups. In terms of the group
mean of these items, the results indicate that the mean scores of commercial importers
are higher than that of the industrial importers on ‘supplier honesty’ and
‘truthfulness’, ‘risk of withdrawing their investment’, and ‘monitoring market trend
for major supplier’s product’. This may happen by chance alone and may not indicate
that these two groups are significantly different. The following two tables along with
the accompanying brief discussion elaborate the firms’ characteristics of the sample.

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