Going Global: Try South First

In Inc.

Many entrepreneurs have their eyes fixed on China, but it may make sense to look south as well as east. The recent passage of the Central American Free Trade Agreement gives the U.S. six new free-trade partners -- Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and the Dominican Republic. The treaty immediately reduces or eliminates 80% of tariffs on U.S. exports -- including IT, medical equipment, and telecommunications supplies -- opening a new world of opportunity. And risk.

Read the article here.

Going Global But Localizing The Brand

In Inc.

There are 1.3 billion potential wine drinkers in China, and Scott Henry, owner of Henry Estate, a winery in Umpqua, Oreg., was convinced they'd love his pinot noir. Henry understood that Western-style wine is a relatively new phenomenon in China, but he also believed that his wine's taste and texture were a perfect match for Chinese cuisine.

Henry Estate is no stranger to exporting. For the past 10 years it has shipped cases to Canada, the U.K., and Japan. How much harder could it be to add China to the list?

Read the article and find out here.

Going Global: Study Your Markets, Develop a Strategic Plan

In Growing-Global.com

Go global before a foreign competitor steals or marginalizes your business. Not only will you expand your market, but you will access a diverse revenue stream which is more stable since you will no longer be as vulnerable to periodic downturns in any one economy. Global companies outperform domestics, growing twice as fast with significantly higher returns.

Find out how and why here.

Abridged Borderbuster 10/5/05

CONTENTS

If you are not a subscriber to Borderbuster, here's a glimpse of what you missed this month:

1. Welcome From The Publisher
2. Feedback From Our Readers
3. The Global Business*
4. Business and Cultural Tips: Have Some Fun!*
5. China Venture News*
6. How I Went Global: Ongoing Series // AskDerekScruggs.com*
7. A Reader Asks: Q&A*
8. Everybody Loves a Freebie -- repeat: FREE OFFER*
9. Going Global Has Its Perils*
10. Energizing Entrepreneurs*
11. Doing Business: Benchmarking Business Regulations*
12. A Wee Bit of Ireland*
13. Laurel’s New e-Book Is Ready: “GODZILLA Global Marketing!”
14. Take A Walk On The Wild Side (TAWOTWS)*
15. Wind Behind Your Sail*
16. Miscellany*

*Indicates exclusive to Borderbuster subscribers only.

Sample section:

3. THE GLOBAL BUSINESS
*Subscriber Exclusive*

Globalization has made the world a smaller place and has changed the way people do business in OECD countries. But did you know that a significant part of global integration reflects trade within transnational firms and industries?

To read the balance of the article, visit:
Leader-Values.com

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A Crash Course In Globalization

In Fortune Small Business

Five years ago, I wrote global small business briefings for Fortune Small Business. Many are still relevant today for going global. Take a look:

8/16/2000
Gaffe-Proof Global Marketing

Don't let your company's sales pitch get lost in a translation.

7/05/2000
Tap Business Opportunities in China

Finding the right partner is the secret to doing business with the Chinese.

6/21/2000
Find the Right Overseas Partner

Team up with a well-connected distributor and watch your sales explode.

6/07/2000
A Crash Course in Doing Business Abroad

Is your Website attracting customers from around the world? Use these sources to learn the ropes of doing business overseas.

You can access links to each of the above articles here.

Case Study: How Lenovo Is Leveraging the Global Brand from East to West

In May 2005, when Lenovo Group completed a U.S. $1.75 billion purchase of IBM's personal computing division, the China-based manufacturer leapfrogged its way to become the No. 3 computer maker in the world, second only to Dell and Hewlett-Packard. Along with rights to the venerable IBM name and logo, Lenovo got Deepak Advani, a Wharton graduate who was serving as vice president of marketing for the old regime.

Read Wharton's interview with Advani, now Lenovo's senior vice president and chief marketing officer, to find out what it takes to merge an Eastern business -- whether big or small -- with a Western one.

Leading In A Global World

In LeaderValues

Globalization is a driving force in business today and its consequences are the subject of much debate. Yet, despite its increasing impact on every aspect of organizational effectiveness, I wonder if most leaders have really confronted its consequences in terms of leadership skills and mindsets.

Global means more than just sourcing or selling in foreign markets.  It means recognizing that as we become more interconnected and interdependent, the basic processes of leadership and management must evolve to keep pace with the changing marketplace.  It means that leaders need not just to “go global” but to “think global.”

Read the entire article here.

Are Women Globalization's Winners?

In the Globalist

Canada has a new foreign minister, Pierre Pettigrew. Reason enough to delve into our archive and present his argument about who benefits and who loses in the era of globalization. In this Globalist retrospective, he finds that three distinct groups — women, immigrants and young people — will not only benefit from globalization, but are better equipped than most for handling its challenges.

The article is adapted from a speech Pettigrew gave at the World Forum 2000 and is more relevant than ever today. Remember, his remarks were made four years prior to the release of Friedman's bestseller, "The World Is Flat," which makes it a very compelling read.

What the global CEO thinks like

In rediff.com

Conventional wisdom talks of economies of scale. But in today's world, perhaps we should be looking at economies of learning and knowledge, says Sir Martin Sorrell, founder of WPP, one of the world's largest advertising groups. He manages over 100 companies operating in 92 countries.

Here's what Sir Sorrell says about what the global CEO thinks like:

"As a global CEO, if your database is well linked, you can be really up to date before you meet others so at least you appear to know what is going on.

Lots of people say that I am too much of a micro manager. I regard that as a compliment, not an insult. There are people who pull away from details and become totally consumed with strategies and tactics but implementation suffers.

If you ask someone why he got fired, the reason is usually because of execution not because they did not have a vision. We tend to have a lot of initiatives going on. I tend to believe that it's better to have thirty initiatives a day so you can get ten done, rather than have three and get just one or two done.

Being prepared is important. There are no nice neat mathematical models. What works in one place will not work in another. There are no global approaches, no blacks and whites but shades of gray. There have to be compromises, with strategic advances and strategic retreats.

You have to have different models. It could be an alliance model with just 20% of the company. It's pretty important to have a vision and execute that vision. I should be determined. Persistence is very important and speed is also very important.

I used to say it's better to take a bad decision on Monday than a good decision on the following Friday and I still think that it is true. You have to give people an instantaneous response, that's why I'm accused of being a micro manager."

Read the entire article here.

Abridged Borderbuster 9/6/05

CONTENTS

If you are not a subscriber to Borderbuster, here's a glimpse of what you missed this month:

1. Welcome From The Publisher
2. Feedback From Our Readers
3. The Changing Face Of Global Business*
4. Business and Cultural Tips: Have Some Fun!*
5. The Next Big Idea*
6. How I Went Global: Ongoing Series // GlobeTrade.com*
7. A Reader Asks: Q&A*
8. Everybody Loves a Freebie -- repeat: FREE OFFER*
9. Business in China: A Wakeup Call*
10. Identify Emerging Market Opportunities*
11. Language Isn’t The Only Trade Barrier*
12. Chinese Ownership of American Companies: A Problem?*
13. Laurel’s New e-Book: “GODZILLA Global Marketing!”
14. Take A Walk On The Wild Side (TAWOTWS)*
15. Wind Behind Your Sail*
16. Miscellany*

*Indicates exclusive to Borderbuster subscribers only.

Sample section:

3. THE CHANGING FACE OF GLOBAL BUSINESS
*Subscriber Exclusive*

Going global has never been easy. Companies have always struggled to reach out effectively to different cultures and balance competing national agendas. What's different today is the speed with which events transpire and major forces react to move markets and shift competitive strengths and weaknesses. Businesses must be savvy enough to identify—if not anticipate—the new sociological, political, and economic trends that emerge almost daily.

To read the balance of the article, visit:
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China's hidden weaknesses

In The American Thinker

This is a great commentary offering good insights and I will follow up with the author, Brian Schwar, who lives in China, to get more of his thoughts on doing business in China. Here's his lead ...

"Before Westerners get carried away with irrational exuberance about the number of new Shanghai skyscrapers going up or the millions of new cars clogging the streets of Beijing, foreigners would do well to gain a greater understanding of the massive economic challenges its Communist leaders need to tackle in the next few years."

To read the entire feature, visit here.

Getting To Global

In ManyWorlds.com

One of my favorite minds in strategic marketing, e-business and innovation is that of Mohan Sawhney, who is the McCormick Tribune Professor of Technology, the Chairperson of the Technology Industry Management Program, and the Director of the Center for Research in Technology and Innovation at the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University (Evanston, IL) -- not too far from where my office is located.

He writes a briefing which states, "Getting to global in a fuller sense means passing through four stages: global sales, global sourcing, global processes, and the differentiated global network."

The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy

New book ...

During a 1999 protest of the World Trade Organization, Rivoli, an economics professor at Georgetown, looked on as an activist seized the microphone and demanded, "Who made your T-shirt?" Rivoli determined to find out. She interviewed cotton farmers in Texas, factory workers in China, labor champions in the American South and used-clothing vendors in Tanzania. Problems, Rivoli concludes, arise not with the market, but with the suppression of the market. Subsidized farmers, and manufacturers and importers with tax breaks, she argues, succeed because they avoid the risks and competition of unprotected global trade, which in turn forces poorer countries to lower their prices to below subsistence levels in order to compete. Rivoli seems surprised by her own conclusions, and while some chapters lapse into academic prose and tedious descriptions of bureaucratic maneuvering, her writing is at its best when it considers the social dimensions of a global economy, as in chapters on the social networks of African used-clothing entrepreneurs.

Source: ICEVED

A Real Chinese Entrepreneur

In Forbes

HANGZHOU, CHINA -- Chinese entrepreneur Richard Wang is one of only a handful of businesspeople in this country to know firsthand what it's like to try to acquire businesses located in the United States.

Four years ago, his Holley Group bought a mobile phone chip-design business with operations in San Jose, Calif., Dallas and Vancouver, British Columbia, from Dutch electronics firm Philips. The business has been downsized and consolidated in Canada, but Wang considers himself successful because he obtained key CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access) technology.

Read the balance of article here.

Laurel's new ebook is ready: GODZILLA Global Marketing!

Get ready. Get set. Get going. Get GODZILLA global.


I make growing global so easy you won't want to miss this and it only costs U.S. $8.95 -- "GODZILLA Global Marketing!"

Or, forget the intro and just buy it now.

From outsourcing to worldsourcing

In International Trade Forum

“Worldsourcing” — global outsourcing — is benefiting a number of developing and transition economies. It is also fundamentally changing the structure of firms.

Some developing and transition economies have recorded local improvements in living standards by supplying the industrial world with products and services that are no longer profitable in high-cost labour economies. Current trends are for firms in industrial countries to move from outsourcing to “offshoring”, even to “worldsourcing."

Country Correspondent Report: Japan

Welcome from Japan  ...

In this month's Japan Inc. magazine, we have a story about a Japanese property manager. Nothing special about that, you might think, until we tell you that he manages temple cemetery plots and sells the tombstones that go in them. Apparently the headstone business alone is worth more than JPY300 billion (US$2.7 billion) annually, and with the current Japanese death rate, the nation's 75,000 temples receive about 40% of the funerary interments (ashes, not bodies), or about 200,000 customers a year -- all with little or no marketing cost.

The subject of our story is one Itsuro Mizukami, a 56-year old Chiba businessman, who has built a mini empire out of buying stone slabs from China, importing and finishing them into tombstones, then placing them in family plots old and new at Buddhist temples. He has assiduously developed a strong personal network with head monks of temples around Japan, and as a result is being asked to supply other services, such as property management and sales, temple repairs, craftsman dispatch, and a host of other related activities.

Mizukami got started in the headstone business after being assigned a project while in his previous job as a city government inspector. He discovered that there are probably about 30,000 headstone suppliers in Japan, but the sector is consolidating rapidly and most of these small family operations are dying out (pun intended). He felt that one problem is that the headstone business is a cottage industry, and that he could systemize it.

23 years later, he has done just that and is now starting to gain traction in both headstones and property management. Last fiscal year, ending March 2005, Mizukami's IM company had 16 branches nationwide, producing revenues of JPY1.5bn (US$14MM) and profits of around 15%. In the next 24 months, he expects sales to climb 25% annually, and within 3 years he plans to have seized 5% of the temple funerary business.

An IPO will come sometime in 2008-2009.

Mizukami's temple-related building maintenance business is quite interesting, and is a good reflection of how he has turned his inside knowledge of temple operations and personal network of head monks into win-win revenue. Many of the wooden temples in Japan are quite ancient and the building techniques needed to support such large structures using traditional means are both complex and arcane. Unfortunately, as renewal schedules fall due, temples around the country are finding that the expertise to repair and renew their buildings is in drastically short supply. Against this background, Mizukami has launched a specialist carpenter dispatch service, which sends skilled tradesmen all over Japan to work on venerable buildings. Not just temples, the tradesmen are also in demand by private building owners as well.

Back to the family cemetery plots, in case you're interested, Mizukami says the procedure for getting one is quite simple. Providing space is available at your local temple, you simply visit the temple's management office and negotiate directly to buy a plot. They're sold, not leased. Out in Nishi Funabashi, where Mizukami lives and operates, the Nichiren sect's Hokekyo Temple has a going rate for one square meter plot of about JPY1.3MM, then about JPY1,000 a year to get the plot maintained by temple monks -- although this second charge is not compulsory.

A cemetery plot can stay with the family for generations, and because people understand its permanence, they tend to want long-lasting memorials, hence the healthy business for the IM company in producing elaborate and expensive headstones. Mizukami says that his customers are buying an art object on which to focus their family's emotions when they pass away. As such, who would want a second-grade effort? Mizukami sells between 20-30 headstones a month, at prices ranging from JPY2-JPY4MM each … An amount which is sufficiently painful to be spiritually purifying!

Reported by Terrie Lloyd, where you can visit his website here.

Chair of Senate Committee Comments on China Revaluing Its Currency

U.S. Newswire

WASHINGTON, July 21 /U.S. Newswire/ -- U.S. Senator Olympia J. Snowe, Chair of the Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship, issued the following statement in response to China's announcement today that it is upwardly revaluing its currency, the yuan, by 2.1 percent and that it has replaced its practice of a fixed dollar peg, for a system based on a basket of currencies:

Snowe: 'More Remains to Be Done to Address China's Currency Manipulation'; Senator Believes China's Actions on Currency Are a Step in Right Direction, But More Must Be Done

Selling Abroad Without the Pain

In Inc. magazine

Ignoring more than 1.3 billion potential customers isn't easy. Yet the thought crossed Dharmesh Shah's mind when he learned how expensive and complex cracking the China market would be. He wouldn't even have tried it if two things hadn't happened. First, Pyramid Digital Solutions Inc. (PDS), his $10-million software-design business based in Birmingham, Ala., received an additional $6 million in funding. Second, PDS was deemed a "partner" by $6-billion SunGard Data Systems, a monster in PDS's market of 401(k) plan software. Without SunGard's existing relationships, PDS wouldn't have had the wherewithal for an international debut, Shah says.

Small businesses tap outsourcing

In Journal Gazette

Many small-business owners have begun to follow a trend set by their larger corporate counterparts and outsourcing personnel tasks such as hiring and firing, measuring staff performance, payroll and benefits.