I think the naked truth of it is that the "wage cost" is a line in the accounting sheet while "craftsmanship", "experience" and other invisible factors in productivity are not. Multinationals are better at it because they can probably stomach the transition pain cost and they have more people over there overseeing the operations
With medium companies it's always, as far as I've seen, a total Mickey Mouse operation of sending some guy over, sometimes not even in a permanent capacity, generally without experience in that sort of things.