SMILE framework

There is no substitute for careful, enlightened assessment and planning. Our practical SMILE framework™ helps you take a logical and thorough approach to doing business in emerging markets.

Too often, the huge opportunities presented by these markets are reduced or even negated by failure to recognise and adapt to the unusual and additional risks not always found in more mature markets.

Using our end-to-end framework, we can help you to identify and avoid the pitfalls in particular markets and thus significantly increase your chances of success.

The SMILE framework™ focuses on five key stages and the issues that need to be considered for each one:

• Strategic assessment - understanding and developing your strategic objectives.
• Market assessment - our industry and country experts, who have in-depth market knowledge and experience, can help you conduct thorough market assessments prior to market entry decisions. We can also work with you to develop effective entry strategies to facilitate a smooth entry and subsequent successful operations.
• Investment structuring - our team of highly experienced investment structuring specialists will be able to leverage PwC's past experiences to help you select the most appropriate operating models for manufacturing, outsourcing, sales, distribution or whatever the rationale is for your investment. This will optimise growth and post tax profitability.
• Layout and infrastructure - our local experts can help you to build or upgrade the required support infrastructure to get your business up and running in the most efficient way and help you build incentive, reporting and control mechanisms to keep it that way, with clear performance monitoring.
• Entity operations - our risk management specialists will be able to help you build robust and cost-effective controls around your operations to maximise performance levels and minimise the likelihood of underperformance, irregularities and fraud.

While you can 'cherry pick' from any stage of the process, we encourage you to at least reflect on all five stages in order to develop a systematic approach to your key risks. You will then be well placed to devise plans for addressing those risks before they turn into problems.

This, in turn, will enable you to focus more effectively on opportunities to drive growth and profitability and also on innovation to create sustainable competitive advantage.