It can. The requirement is one continuous year of qualifying employment with the qualifying organization outside the United States in the three years before the petition, and a qualifying parent, branch, subsidiary or affiliate abroad may satisfy it. What matters is the corporate relationship and the continuity of the employment, not which country it was in.
Prove the corporate link, then prove the continuity
Two separate exercises are involved and they use different records. Establishing that the foreign employer is part of the qualifying organization is a corporate task: share registers, group structure charts and, where the chain runs through holding companies, documents for each link. Establishing continuity is a human-resources task: payroll registers, employment agreements, leave records and assignment letters covering the whole period without gaps.
Groups that move people between plants frequently have complete records; groups that arranged a posting informally sometimes do not, and discovering that early leaves time to reconstruct it. Note also that time worked in the United States for the same group does not count toward the year abroad. A licensed adviser should assess the specific history.
Hypothetical example: Tawanda maintains proprietary railway-signalling test systems for a multinational supplier. Prepare two separate charts first: a month-by-month overseas employment ledger and a knowledge comparison explaining why the U.S. operation needs his particular internal expertise.
Payroll, assignment letters and leave records settle the first chart; training access, restricted procedures and product-release records support the second. Build the timeline before relying on total years of service. The mistake is treating general industry skill as specialized knowledge.
The employee needs twelve uninterrupted months with a qualifying overseas entity in the relevant three-year period, and L-1B is capped at five years.