Where are you in emerging markets?

Companies can be at quite different positions in relation to their presence and intentions regarding the emerging markets. This illustrative continuum (94K PDF) demonstrates some of the key stages.

The changing risks

Your organisation could be at one end of the continuum - just starting to think about entering overseas markets, or you may already be very committed in terms of doing business overseas as a strong multi-national. As organisations move up this continuum and their investments overseas become larger and more diverse, the risk profile does not necessarily reduce, but it's likely to change.

At the 'limited' end, risks can be amplified due to a lack of familiarity and awareness of the new market, where organisations can face unique challenges and issues. In our experience, as organisations increase their focus on doing business overseas, and they move more towards the 'significant' end of the continuum, the risks change as their organisation and their strategic relationships become more complex.

Organisations can significantly benefit from adopting more formalised and thorough processes for evaluating and monitoring their investments, which help drive innovation, leverage off efficiencies, reduce costs and manage risks. We can help companies assess their position and determine the appropriate responses at every stage of the continuum.

Practical steps to identifying your needs

If, for example, you have narrowed down your choice of alternative, lower cost manufacturing plants to one of the central European economies and you need some tax structuring advice, due diligence on a potential joint venture partner and want to structure your contracts to protect your intellectual property as much as possible.

We can certainly help you with all three, but will also encourage you to consider where you are on the continuum and will use our high-level diagnostic tool to help you assess whether the skills, processes, policies and resources you have adequately match the level of investment you are making and satisfy your requirements for achieving a successful and sustainable venture abroad.

We will also introduce you to our SMILE framework™ which is a logical, step-by-step method of analysing the processes any business should go through when investing in a new market to ensure you have covered all the bases.