It has been some time since the last post, but I wanted to mention that the last post was published on SeekingAlpha (Here)

For this post, I wanted to highlight IBM’s biennial global CEO study. Last month IBM took out a few full page ads in the June 23rd issue of Fortune advertising their study which can be found here:

Study Link
(you have to register first and then are allowed to download it)

The study personally interviewed 1,130 CEO’s worldwide (the breakdown is: 121 from Japan, 248 Asia, 364 EU, 39 non-EU, 290 North America, and 68 South America). The CEO’s headed a wide variety of companies- 19% of them had over 50,000 employees, and 22% had less than 1,000 – and it is unclear how they selected their sample. They reviewed topics like changing business trends, developing markets in non-developed countries, and future strategic plans.
To be honest, I thought that the 79 page report had a few extremely pertinent, interesting statistics, but as a whole it was rather sparse in terms of useful content (frankly read very much like a marketing document).

A few of the interesting points are:

A quote from a “real estate CEO from India” – “In India, 400 million consumers will demand new housing in the next 20 years – that’s more real estate than the United States has built since the Second World War.”

A quote in from their “global integration” section – “Traditional views of globalization – labor arbitrage and riding the wave of economic growth in China and India – are being replaced by a new focus: global integration.” Which I think is a very interesting concept. A few years ago, when one discussed “globalization” – it was almost always in the context of outsourcing labor to the developing world. Now, more and more companies are targeting these markets as expansion areas.

This is a great one: “With economic development and consumer purchasing power rising in many countries, new markets are an important source of growth. Three out of four CEOs told us they intend to actively enter new markets. This intent holds true for CEOs in emerging (72 percent) and established (76 percent) economies and for companies of all sizes.

Well, in my opinion, it was at least worth noting and it is an extremely quick read since the content can be fairly sparse. I look forward to writing more soon.

Last 5 posts by Jonathan O'Shaughnessy

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