In 2020, Starbucks opened 1,404 new stores, and 1,117 of them were located outside the U.S. In the same year, Tesla built and expanded its Gigafactories in China and Germany. In early 2021, Samsung announced a plan to invest as much as $17 billion to build a chip plant in the U.S. Why do these industry giants invest so heavily in foreign countries even during a global pandemic? What are the impacts of those investments? To better understand the answers to these questions, we need to learn about an important term in the international business field: foreign direct investment.