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... emerging markets -- defined by the company as Brazil, India, Russia, China, Vietnam, Mexico, Indonesia, Nigeria, Turkey and the Balkan states -- overtaking North America and Europe as the biggest overseas market for its overall consumer products by 2013.Read more about this here.
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emerging markets,
Panasonic goes local
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That nearly every single person on the planet will have a global small business that hopefully will become BIG someday. This evolution will be similar to the shift from black and white television to color. If you had tried to watch black and white television for the rest of your life — which some consumers attempted to do because they didn’t have the money to buy a color set or hated change — that set someday would die. At some point, to repair it would have cost far more than a brand new color TV. So whether they liked it or not, consumers had to move with the masses and upgrade to the new color technology. They soon discovered it was the coolest invention ever and the best investment that money could buy! That’s how I envision the radical shift from small business to global small business.Find out five (5) best practices on why it's happening here.
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While Peter Drucker was alive, he sounded early warnings about sky-high executive pay, an ossified auto industry, and emerging — market threats to U.S. economic dominance. It's not too late to benefit from his advice.By Alan M. Kantrow
Peter Drucker's writings offer distilled, articulate analyses of modern business management. But, more important, they are a case study in how to think. Five leaders describe Drucker's influence on them in essays that accompany Kantrow's 1980 article.By Tammy Erickson
We're not quite there yet, but, as usual, Peter's clear vision paints a picture of a world that is looking increasingly likely.Classic Drucker Articles
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Mr. Bernanke avoided what was in many ways the elephant in the room: the value of the United States dollar. The dollar has dropped sharply in recent weeks against the euro and the Japanese yen, a move that has helped increase American exports by making them cheaper in some foreign markets. But the dollar has not budged in more than a year against China’s renminbi, which the Chinese continue to tightly manage and which many economists say remains greatly undervalued.Read more here.
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International store sales were $2.6 billion last year; roughly 19% of the company's total store sales. U.S. Online sales reached $1 billion last year.To think they started out small. It gives us all hope that we can go from global small business to BIG business. They are now in a major turn-around mode with a huge international push.
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China,
expand internationally,
Gap
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Evian,
France,
Laurel Delaney,
The Global Small Business Blog
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Google says its focusing on minority languages. This includes regional, heritage, indigenous, and threatened languages. Google wants to help preserve these lesser known languages so that these smaller cultures won't be forgotten as history constantly unfolds.One of the minority languages is Māori. Read more here.
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Google
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In the U.S., the Commerce Department said Friday that the dollar value of exports, which surged in July, rose another 0.2% in August. That put exports at their highest level since December, but still 21% below year-ago levels. Lower oil imports reduced imports by 0.6%, narrowing the trade deficit to $30.7 billion after four months of widening.Read more at "Trade Upturn Hints at a Recovery."
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global trade,
IMF,
International Monetary Fund,
WSJ
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Fair Trade
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The simple thesis of this essay is that American society could also fail if it does not force itself to conceive of failure. The massive crises that American society is experiencing now are partly the product of just such a blindness to potential catastrophe. That is not a diagnosis I deliver with rancor. Nations, like individuals, languish when they only have uncritical lovers or unloving critics. I consider myself a loving critic of the United States, a critic who wants American society to succeed. America, I wrote in 2005 in Beyond the Age of Innocence: Rebuilding Trust Between America and the World, “has done more good for the rest of the world than any other society.” If the United States fails, the world will suffer too.Read the entire article here (and don't miss out on the comments -- you might end up adding a few of your own!).
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'Every team within our building will be involved in this effort to determine what we can do now to make our trade policies more effective in helping small and medium-sized businesses, as we are in assisting ... multinational corporations,' U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk told reporters.Read more here.
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container ships,
export,
global SMBs,
global trade
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I work for a libertarian think tank, and libertarians are supposed to disdain the land of poutine and Dan Aykroyd for its socialist health-care system and general failure to really love liberty. Yet not only can you get gay-married in any of the provinces, or almost-legally toke up in your toque up there, but Canada’s economy is also slightly freer than that of the global hegemon to its south. According to the Cato Institute, at least.Read the full whimsical story here.
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Canada,
The Atlantic,
The Global Small Business Blog
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It is imperative to create a national environment ripe for entrepreneurship and risk taking that allows U.S. companies to be internationally competitive in a global exchange of ideas and innovation. Through competitive markets, innovations diffuse and scale appropriately across industries and globally.3. Catalyze Breakthroughs for National Priorities.
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Ms. Li's company got a major boost after Mr. Buffett, chairman and chief executive of Berkshire Hathaway Inc., recently appeared in a Dayang promotional video, posted on the company's Web site. He heaped praise on Ms. Li, her company, and the nine Trands suits he proudly owns. Shares of Dayang's Shanghai-listed subsidiary, Dalian Dayang Trands Co., have soared by more than 70% since the video was posted on Sept. 10.I don't know about you but I am to see if I can capture Mr. Buffett's interest in our work.
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To put this into perspective,
that equates to 26 messages for every person
on the planet (6.7 billion).
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Global FDI prospects are set to remain gloomy in 2009, with inflows expected to fall below $1.2 trillion," UNCTAD said. "However, recovery of these flows is expected to begin slowly in 2010 to reach up to $1.4 trillion, and will gather momentum in 2011 when the level could reach an estimated $1.8 trillion."Read more about what's going on here.
The 2009 forecast is well below 2008's $1.7 trillion, which was in turn down 14 percent from the 2007 peak of $2.0 trillion.
"In the short run, with the global recession expanding into 2009 and slow growth projected for 2010, as well as the drastic fall of corporate profits, FDI is expected to be low," it said.
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No. People haven't really changed. The technology changes much faster than we change our behavior and certainly faster than our biology can keep up. But, even if we aren't really changing, it's time we at least understand the program. As individuals and as a society, we must realize that information in the digital age has different properties than when we relied on flyers, party lines, and the 6 o'clock News. We function as an information network. Every single one of us can document and distribute events and information. The very act of people passing along a piece of information changes its import and impact.Take a look at how Pamela Rutledge, Ph.D., M.B.A. (her blog here) and Director of the Media Psychology Research Center, handles the situation here.
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One may observe that Ronald Reagan stood for enterprise, free trade and low taxes, whereas Barack Obama stands for other things.Read more here.
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from bear to bull,
James Grant,
WSJ
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Move into new markets. Can you build or acquire additional capabilities on an as-needed basis? These new markets can be adjacent, emerging or overseas, but only “if you have practical and immediate advantages there,” adds Treacy. Have you thought about going global? What’s stopping you? Somebody in another country is probably yearning for your product or service because they need it.
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Still, Cadbury estimates that more than half of India's more than one billion people have never tasted chocolate. Traditional milk-based sweets still dominate the industry, and even those are mostly eaten during festival times. That's why, like other candy companies, Cadbury sees giant potential in India.Read more here to find out why.
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chocolate,
export chocolate,
India
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"The driver of our growth is not to make money, but to continue investing in this market." ~ Harish Manwani, president of Unilever's Asia, Africa, Central and Eastern Europe division.
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WSJ: L'Oréal already has a wide presence in emerging markets. What is left for growth?Read the entire interview here and learn about L'Oreal's anti-crisis strategy.
Mr. Agon: We are really pushing our acceleration of business in new markets. Even this year, if Western Europe, North America or Japan are tough, the rest of the world is doing very well. China is growing, Brazil is growing, India is growing. And we are also opening up new markets where we were not before. Since the beginning of the year we have opened three new subsidiaries—in Egypt, Pakistan and Kazakhstan.
The internationalization is really doing well. For example, [first-half sales growth in] Brazil is 21%, India is 16%, South Africa is 19%, China is 14%. In a crisis year, when a big country like India or China or Brazil is growing double-digit like this, it's very encouraging.
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First Solar Goes to China,
Motley Fool,
solar war,
Toby Shute
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"Over 3.5 million patent applications are pending around the world, including over 750,000 in the U.S. Pendency periods [the time during which a patent is "pending"] are extending to three, four or in some cases five years before final patents are issued," Horacio Gutierrez, Microsoft deputy general counsel, said in a blog post Tuesday: Improving Global Patents: Think Locally, Act Globally.Read more here.
What that means is that obtaining and enforcing a patent for a product sold internationally quickly becomes prohibitively expensive.
"The cost of this workload to patent applicants and patent offices is too high, and the delays in securing patents are too long for entrepreneurs and large enterprises alike," Gutierrez said in his post on Microsoft's On the Issues blog.
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When it comes to the all-too-human problem of recessions and depressions, economists need to abandon the neat but wrong solution of assuming that everyone is rational and markets work perfectly. The vision that emerges as the profession rethinks its foundations may not be all that clear; it certainly won’t be neat; but we can hope that it will have the virtue of being at least partly right.A few notes about it here.
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Labels:
globalization,
information age,
Karl Fisch,
Scott McLeod,
shift happens
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The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid offers a blueprint for driving the radical innovation you'll need to profit in emerging markets--and using those innovations to become more competitive everywhere. This new paperback edition includes eleven concise, fast-paced success stories from India, Peru, Mexico, Brazil, and Venezuela--ranging from salt to soap, banking to cellphones, healthcare to housing.Don't miss out on the opportunity to capture the world's fastest growing market -- the bottom of the pyramid -- where billions of poor people have enormous untapped buying power.
Simply put, this book is about making a revolution: building profitable "bottom of the pyramid" markets, reducing poverty, and creating an inclusive capitalism that works for everyone.
CK Prahalad is Paul and Ruth McCracken Distinguished University Professor of Strategy at the Ross School of Business, The University of Michigan. He is a globally recognized management thinker. Times of London and Suntop Media elected him as the most influential management thinker alive today in 2007. He is coauthor of bestsellers in Management such as Competing for the Future, The Future of Competition and The New Age of Innovation. He has won the McKinsey Prize for the best article four times. He has received several honorary doctorates including one from the University of London and the Stevens School of Technology. He has worked with CEOs and senior management at many of the world’s top companies. He is also member of the Board of NCR corporation, Pearson plc., Hindustan Unilever ltd., World Resources Institute, and the Indus Entrepreneurs (TiE).Books by C.K. Prahalad
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SMEs worldwide are using the Internet to increase their reach. According to a poll of US marketers by Bredin Business Information, 17 per cent of SMEs want to boost their online activity to make a bigger impact without much of a budget risk.Read more about how it can be done, here.
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