In international business research, there is an increasing trend in investigating ambidexterity as a means of understanding how internationalizing firms go about to facilitate the simultaneous pursuit of exploitation and exploration. Even though both theory and empirical data have highlighted the benefits of an ambidextrous approach, a coherent understanding of the resources needed to enable ambidexterity, and a clear picture of how ambidexterity may be achieved in practice is lacking. Recent studies also call for more research to investigate how managerial and organizational capabilities complement each other and affect organizational performance. The objective of this study is to identify specific managerial and organizational capabilities that are important for enabling international ambidexterity in the context of emerging market SMEs. The study aims to contribute to the dynamic capabilities-perspective in an international SME context by disclosing how managerial and organizational capabilities can be used to help SMEs pursue ambidextrous approaches. The study is based on SME-data from an emerging market, Vietnam. Thus, it enriches the scant literature on the pursuit of international ambidexterity in SMEs from Southeast Asian countries.