The paper presents a qualitative study of rapidly and gradually internationalising Polish firms. It compares these two types of firms with a special attention to their competitive strategies. The results show that there are more similarities than differences between the two groups of firms from emerging markets. These findings, based on case studies and interviews must be interpreted with a lot of caution, because the similar strategic behaviour of gradually internationalising firms to rapidly internationalising firms may stem from the fact that the former want to quickly reduce the distance to their counterparts in highly developed countries and thus take some strategic actions similar to rapidly internationalising firms.