BCG publication: Top Companies from Emerging Markets

Manuel Bueno — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 16:18:41 -0500

Julia Tran mentioned in a previous post some Boston Consulting Group (BCG) publications related with the “Next Billion”. Two more studies were published in November –“Decoding Next Billion Consumers” and “A Road Map to expanding Financial Inclusion in India” (this second one looks good and I am planning to read it soon).

Recently, NextBillion posted a news item published by The Economist related to the latest BCG publication about emerging markets called “The 2008 BCG 100 New Global Challengers”. This time, it referred to emerging countries’ multinationals and their international growth strategies as a means of becoming world leaders in their markets.

The rise of emerging market multinationals is of no surprise to anyone in the business world, especially in the case of large national firms based in Brazil, Russia, India and China –the BRIC economies.

The BCG Publication (this document is an executive report available on their webpage, I have ordered the full report, but have not received it yet) disappointed me in terms of their methodology and selection process for what they call the “Top 100 Global Challengers”. It does, however, give an interesting overview of these firms’ business models and their core strengths.

BCG selected their Top 100 from 14 countries. These 14 countries, or “Rapidly Developing Economies” (RDEs) as they call them, have been selected on the basis of their increasing share of global trade and their total GDP. However, the authors have given themselves ample space in selecting countries that are clearly not comparable to each other. Stating that Poland (member of the EU) and Hungary (to join the EU on 2008) are as “emerging” as Egypt (long time dictatorship and notorious human rights violator) or Indonesia (largest Muslim population in the world) seems a bit of a stretch. Likewise Chile has been included alongside Brazil and Argentina. I strongly doubt that companies from such different business environments can be compared and studied seamlessly.

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BCG publication: Top Companies from Emerging Markets