During my flight back home to New Jersey from a successful Regional Spotlight in Buenos Aires, the movies offered on the plane were not that interesting, so instead I began to think about examples of successful global brands coming from emerging markets: Chile’s Concha y Toro (one of the world’s most important brands wine with a presence in over 130 countries), Mexico’s Televisa (multimedia conglomerate, the largest media company in the Spanish-speaking world, and don’t I watch their soap operas everyday!), India’s Bollywood (the informal term for the Hindi-language film industry based in Mumbai), China’s Lenovo (third-largest global computer manufacturer in the world), India’s Ranbaxy (leading generic drug manufacturer and researcher), Israel’s TEVA (among the largest generic pharmaceutical companies worldwide), Brazil’s Petrobras (oil producer with refineries, production and exploration areas, pipelines and terminals), India’s Reliance (largest private sector conglomerate in the country, with a wide range of products including petroleum products, petrochemicals and garments), Mexico’s CEMEX (world's largest building materials supplier and third largest cement producer), Mexico’s Modelo (maker of Corona beer, one of the top five selling beers worldwide, available in over 150 countries). In the telecom space, China Telecom and Telmex/América Móvil are powerhouses, just to name a few.
The notion that companies from emerging markets are nothing more than basic producers of low-cost, low-tech products is no longer valid. By 2005-06, one in 10 of Fortune magazine’s top 500 global companies belonged to emerging markets. Yes, emerging market companies can produce low-cost innovations that can threaten many companies in the developed world. But the change we are about to witness is a lot more complex.
Coming from an emerging market myself (Latin America) and having also done business across Asia, exceptional thinking and an outstanding ability to adapt to changing business circumstances is a remarkable quality in most emerging markets. We learn to be creative, even when resources are scarce or market conditions don’t play in our favor. We are used to fluctuating economic conditions and volatile environments, but inventiveness, adaptability and resilience is the norm.
Because emerging markets have hugely competitive domestic conditions, and most customers are of modest resources, there is a fundamental need to be highly innovative and extremely efficient when developing new products or services. And these are qualities that many companies in developed markets needed to learn (to be lean, that is), but it’s an intrinsic requirement in an emerging markets for business survival. Companies in emerging markets need to have that “lean” thinking in their DNA.
In a globalized economy, where anyone from anywhere can compete for almost anything, building a successful organization requires a mentality “without borders’ that can adopt and adapt business skills that would probably require a lot of the innovative business thinking coming from emerging markets, because the path to innovation is no longer exclusive to the developed world. That, I know for sure.
Posted
04-23-2010 7:07 AM
by
Monica Zlotogorski