This gets really fun when thinking about media piracy.
The risk of ignoring a market isn't just the lost immediate revenue, it's that that market might develop in ways that are worse for you in the long run.
The canonical can't-argue-against example of pirating a movie or show is "I literally can't even pay to watch this in my country, right now." But once a substantial industry exists to satisfy the people with no legal option, the people in the countries with plenty of legal options have access to it too! And then it turns into "why pay when torrent?"
If Spotify had existed worldwide in 1998, would Napster have been big? If Netflix/Hulu/Amazon/iTunes purchases+rentals had all existed and been global in the year 2000, would movie/TV file sharing have taken off in the same way it did? Or would it be more like app store piracy - I'm sure it exists, but I don't know anybody who bothers, and those things were global and online from day 1.
The comparison to cars isn't direct, but it's not hard to find disruption of physical goods manufacturing sparked by lower-end-at-first competitors arising from a less-served market.
The copycats are coming either way, you might as well make some money in the mean time. Even if it were impossible for copycats to emerge without these partnerships (so ignore domestic innovation, reverse engineering, foreign education, foreign consultants, and espionage) odds are your competitor already partnered so you have nothing more to lose.
The risk of ignoring a market isn't just the lost immediate revenue, it's that that market might develop in ways that are worse for you in the long run.
The canonical can't-argue-against example of pirating a movie or show is "I literally can't even pay to watch this in my country, right now." But once a substantial industry exists to satisfy the people with no legal option, the people in the countries with plenty of legal options have access to it too! And then it turns into "why pay when torrent?"
If Spotify had existed worldwide in 1998, would Napster have been big? If Netflix/Hulu/Amazon/iTunes purchases+rentals had all existed and been global in the year 2000, would movie/TV file sharing have taken off in the same way it did? Or would it be more like app store piracy - I'm sure it exists, but I don't know anybody who bothers, and those things were global and online from day 1.
The comparison to cars isn't direct, but it's not hard to find disruption of physical goods manufacturing sparked by lower-end-at-first competitors arising from a less-served market.