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This paper explores how expatriates deal with host country informal business practices that differ from their home country institutional frameworks. We note that expatriate business people working in emerging markets of Africa often contend with corrupt business practices rooted in local informal institutions and the lack of strong formal institutions regulating business practices. We also observe that while local people take informal institutions such as magendo, as a way of life and adjust to them, expatriates being ‘outsiders’ respond in different ways. The study employed a qualitative phenomenological design that involved in-depth interview of a small sample of expatriates operating in Uganda. For data analysis, NVivo 11 was used to search for and retrieve chunks of labelled data. The key findings indicate that expatriates from countries with strong formal institutions experience the most frustrations and often reject informal business practices. On the other hand, expatriates from countries with weak institutions are more pragmatic and easily adapt to existing practices in the new environments. Multinationals however, often reject informal business practices due to their market power and strict codes of conduct.The study recommends that small-medium category expatriates targeting Africa need to align with influential local people so as to navigate business informalities that characterise informal business environments.

The telecommunication industry is different from other industries in the basis of innovation rate. This industry continuously provides end users with new technological generations and disruptive technologies. Due to the complexity of the nature of the product served, telecommunication industry is an important case to study in order to explain the real reasons for the challenges facing telecom companies. Researching in this area will explain why some companies survive while others fail. The wide range served technology innovations is most likely to result in rapid mutation of consumers’ spending habits thus directly influencing the mobile phone companies. The aim of this is to test the reliability of innovations and its impact on companies’ profitability. For that purpose, a survey with 200 end users and 20 employees from two telecom providers (“Alfa, and “Touch”) was conducted to investigate various disruptive and conventional means and their impact on the financial performance of telecom industry. The results show that most of the revenue of telecom industry comes from usage of data while the industry is lacking for competition, and quality services while charging high tariffs for customers. Currently customers are migrating to data, therefore performing a pressure on the industry to improve its services. To conclude, network operators need to decide what to they want to sacrifice and how far they want to go to reach targeted results.