Tuesday, July 21, 2009

The Case For Globalized Solutions

Globalized Solutions are becoming more important today due to some of the key trends like GDP by Region, World Population Distribution and Increased Investment in Emerging Markets. This post will emphasize the effect of these trends on Globalization.

GDP by Region

Here is a graph of the world GDP distribution. As evident from the graph, though North America is the largest part, it is still only a third of the entire GDP. The other markets like European Union, Japan, China together form a large chunk of the GDP graph. People in these countries obviously don’t speak English natively. Even small percentage penetration into these markets can improve margins significantly for companies.

World Population Distribution

Here is a graph of the world population distribution. Notice how radically the ranking change from the GDP graph.

Observe that more than half of the world’s population is in Asia, where a large chunk of non-English speaking population exists. China is fully dominated by Chinese language. India is dominated by multiplicity of languages each having a potential business opportunity.

Increased Investment in Emerging Markets

Many companies are creating business units around emerging markets like China and India as they see their future business coming from these markets. There is a significant push in these countries to modernize right now and this is moving at a significant pace.

Several real-life examples can be seen like - Usage of Mobile devices, Usage of Bank ATMs etc. As one can see today ATMs in India offer solution using Local Language / English. Mobile companies are offering solutions that allow messages to be sent in different local languages.

Emerging Markets - As good as Developed Countries

Business conglomerates, similar to developed countries are evolving in emerging markets. Companies like Bharti Airtel, Vodafone, BSNL are comparable to Verizon, AT&T etc, Banks like ICICI, SBI are no smaller than Bank of America, Citibank etc. Retail channels like Reliance Fresh, Future Bazaar, etc are similar to Wal-Mart, Radio Shack etc. Similar situations exist in China. In addition many of the multinational organizations are setting up operations in emerging markets. However customer reach can increase in these markets if offerings are expanded in different local languages.