When operating outside the Basque country, the co-ops have purchased or created conventional companies as fully-owned subsidiaries or established joint ventures with conventional firms. A number of these are located in other parts of Spain, or other Western European countries, but most are in the transition economies of Central and Eastern Europe and in emerging countries on other continents. There was an internal policy to spread the co-op principles to those new entities, but failed to be implemented, mainly because of certain resistance from the member and managers, but also due to sheer difficulty of putting these ideas into practice, plain economic self-interest and fear of failure implications.

The group did create joint ventures with conventional companies overseas partly to have partners with whom to share the investment burden, partly because of the local partners’ knowledge of the sector and their familiarity with local business culture, governance practice and legal environments. Many in MCC believe the group should work more closely with cooperative movements in the countries where it wants to locate. But cooperative firms in some countries are only nominally cooperatives and in certain cases have been historically affiliated with repressive regimes, or with business and political efforts to undermine independent trade union and labor movements. According to Jesús Herrasti, former director of international operations, the most important asset for starting a cooperative firm is a group of committed cooperativists. In many countries people seem to have little knowledge of how Cooperatives work and no apparent interest in worker-ownership schemes. To launch cooperatives in those countries requires a long-term, large educational effort both both in communities and in enterprises.

Mondragon University’s Institute for Cooperative Studies – Lanki–, among other organisations, has begun to consider strategies for how these education and community development issues could be addressed overseas, but most recognise, again, that they constitute a major undertaking that will take many years to develop, adapt and implement in different cultures in different parts of the world.

There are also legal and financial complications of establishing worker-owned organisations successfully overseas that can vary from country to country and sector to sector. Many countries, for example, do not have legislation that recognises the worker-cooperative legal form or that facilitates worker participation in capital ownership. Starting firms also faces the barrier of start-up losses; that is, most new operations lose money for at least the first few years. To many in Mondragon it borders on outlandish to suggest that the co-ops try to persuade foreign workers, most with very modest incomes, to make investments in co-ops that would only lose value for some period of years. Different groups in Mondragon are analysing legal and financial arrangements that might overcome these barriers.