The market context of the foreign subsidiary is essential in determining an appropriate headquarter-subsidiary relationship in international strategy making. The study aims to extend the understanding of linkages between business strategy and performance of foreign subsidiaries by focusing on customer access moderations. Hypotheses were tested on 263 subsidiaries in Europe and the USA. The subsidiaries belong to Swedish manufacturing firms. The study found that the customer scope of the subsidiary positively triggers its performance if it encounters many obstacles to accessing customers. The study also found that a subsidiary emphasis on differentiation of products from those of competitors negatively triggers performance regardless of the number of obstacles, while customer responsiveness differentiation has positive effects where there are few obstacles. Contributions to literature are discussed.