University of Baghdad - dated view of quad

George Mason University professor Hugh Gusterson has published a provocative article entitled, “An education in occupation,” about the sad state of Iraq’s once great university system, arguably one of the best in the Middle East until the 1990s.

The importance of having an open, active, funded, and interconnected (with the public and private sectors) cannot be stressed enough. Monies spent on education are not “spent” in the typical manner of consumed goods and services. Rather, education is an invaluable investment that pays dividends for life. Prof. Gusterson’s description of the failure thus far to secure proper funding for restoring Iraq’s universities screams of opportunity.

TradeFlow21 is hopeful that new (or renewed) efforts of domestic (Iraq) and international public or private entities will be undertaken to implement the necessary steps to rebuilding Iraq’s universities. In the process there will be abundant opportunities to create and fill new jobs of all types and likewise there will be great need for materials, products, and human capital. “An education in occupation” is well worth the read. May it also give reason for  pause to Americans to consider the condition of state universities, where tuition hikes and cut backs threaten our own post-secondary education system.

Saudi Aramco Oil Facility

Some may have seen recent news reports of Saudi Arabia targeting $100 oil. TradeFlow21 has tweeted (Jan 18th: “Saudi Arabia is not targeting $100 oil.“) a very helpful article on just the subject. Complementing the article, TF21 adds that triple-digit oil prices are not exactly in the Saudi’s or any oil exporting country’s best interest. Reason being is that often times when oil prices are high, they are accompanied by higher prices almost across the board. In volatile times like now, at home in the U.S. and in countries around the world, wages paid to employees that have not kept up with inflation are partially to blame for discontent. Thus, $100-plus oil is not helpful to Saudi Arabia if it in turn must pay higher prices for materials (and services) for the tens and hundreds of billions of dollars of real investments it’s making.

Excerpts:

Ahmet C. Bozer, president of the Coca-Cola Company’s Eurasia and Africa Group, has spent his career demonstrating how a large international company can build a strategy and structure itself to compete in emerging markets. Coca-Cola is one of the most globally active international companies, deriving 80 percent of its sales from outside the U.S., and it is therefore one of the most experienced in tackling emerging markets, including Egypt and Pakistan, where political tension renders the business environment uncertain and Coca-Cola’s strategy has proven resilient.

Bozer, who was born and raised in Turkey, has worked for Coca-Cola since 1990 in various capacities, including operations and finance, as well as leading the Coca-Cola bottling company in Turkey. [...]

S+B: Your late CEO Roberto Goizueta charged the company to “think global, act local” in its strategy. How do you accomplish this?

BOZER: I wish it was as easy as repeating the slogan. The key for international companies is finding the right mix of global and local in their operations. The Coca-Cola brand is global, but it must be locally relevant. We may be giving the same happiness message, the same brand architecture may be communicated, but it has to be done differently in each country.

S+B: Your structure has strong regional managers such as yourself, but headquarters in Atlanta maintains global responsibility for sales, finance, and marketing — and for specific product lines like water or juices. How do you manage this?

BOZER: We are a franchise system. Our bottlers are primarily local. In Turkey, for example, we have a Turkish bottler. So the effectiveness of our company depends on the effectiveness of our relationships with the bottlers and our brands. To manage franchise relationships, you have to have a geographic orientation. Therefore our organization is primarily geographic. Globally, we have five operating groups: North America, Latin America, Europe, Eurasia and Africa, and Pacific.

At the same time, the juice business requires a different organizational structure than the sparkling beverages business. The raw material costs are high and fluctuate a lot, and there are opportunities to innovate more quickly; we may introduce four or five new variants of a juice in a given year. Thus, there is a matrix. A functional group in Atlanta is in charge of juices worldwide, but they work through the geographic organizations.

We are still evolving in finding the best local and global combination that works for us. When it comes to franchise relations with the bottlers, that is local. We have to make decisions in the local context with the right speed. Quality standards are both local (we adhere to all local government safety regulations) and global (we have our own global, rigorous, quality control standards). But we take advantage of our global properties and collaborate as a global team, bringing the best resources to bear on a specific issue.

S+B: How do you manage disagreements between the field and headquarters?

BOZER: We have been working on it for many years. We all understand that nothing is as black-and-white as we’d like. Let’s say I’m hiring a function leader. I am the ultimate decision maker, but I know that any function leader must operate as part of the global team. He or she must be able to collaborate globally, and the global organization has to be comfortable with that candidate. This is where maturity is important. We emphasize a collaborative process because it makes the decision better. But our culture is purely focused on making the right choice, rather than defining my turf versus your turf. That allows us to make these decisions quickly.

S+B: How do you manage the dramatic variations in cultures and politics among your 90 markets?

BOZER: It’s not as difficult as it might seem. I have six business units, based in South Africa, Kenya, Turkey, Russia, India, and Dubai. And I have a functional team in Istanbul with finance, marketing, and strategy capabilities. The functional team works as part of the global team to come up with strategic plans for each market. We share those with the business units, and we expect them to enrich [the plans] and add value to them by adapting them to their own needs.

Russia might say, “Well, iced tea is a big category here, so here’s how we are going to compete [with that product].” There is a clear thread of consistency among all the regions; we stay connected to the global team in Atlanta through the finance and marketing communities.

S+B: What do you see as the greatest opportunity in your 90 markets?

BOZER: If you project the demographics of today into 2020, you will find that about half of the favorable changes will be located in Eurasia and Africa: new entrants into the middle class, an increase in the number of teenagers, urbanization. A few of these countries have very high per capita consumption of our beverages. South Africa is about 250 drinks per year per person, which is above the global average. Turkey is higher than 150. But when you take those relatively well-developed markets out and look at India, Pakistan, sub-Saharan Africa, Russia, and central Asia, those markets have very low per capita consumption — for the whole industry. In India, just 4 or 5 percent of the beverages consumed are packaged. People drink tap water, tea, and dairy; vendors squeeze juice on the street. When people start having a bit more money and a middle class emerges, demand for packaged beverages will increase.

In that context, our strategy is not very complicated. We know how to grow “Brand Coke.” It’s about locally relevant brand building with consumers — the right pricing and packaging, with small packs, large packs, or take-home packs. We place new coolers in the market and invest in people, putting “feet on the street,” and activate outlets one by one. At the same time, there is a flourishing juice business and a flourishing water business, and in some of our markets, teas and energy drinks are developing.

S+B: How do you make yourself “locally relevant?”

BOZER: We have very strong consumer marketing teams. We invest a lot in understanding the psyche of the local consumer. In Egypt, during the Arab Spring [uprisings], our marketing people were able to tap into the psyche of the public — especially the teenagers. We understood that despite the uncertainty they were going through, they wanted to create a bright future. Our brand promise is happiness and optimism. Our team quickly put together some excellent consumer communication with the message that if everybody came together, the Egyptian people could build a better future. That message was delivered in a wonderful ad in which the skies over Tahrir Square in Cairo are quite overcast and dark, but people get together and throw ropes to the clouds and start pulling the ropes. The clouds open up and the sun appears. That type of communication resonated extremely well. We tapped into the feelings and emotions that were most relevant to the Egyptian people.

We try to do this kind of thing everywhere. We have good marketers in each country who have access into consumer insight data, and who work with very good agencies, while at the same time working with robust global processes.

[...]

S+B: You have a tremendous variation in the type and sophistication of bottlers you work with, ranging from a giant like SABMiller in South Africa to mom-and-pop-type bottlers in other markets. How do you adapt to their different styles and capabilities?
BOZER: This is the bread and butter of our business: being effective with our partnerships. Our partners may be multi-country bottlers, or they may operate within a single country. They may be public or private. In some countries we work with multiple bottlers. We have all kinds of relationships.

With each one, we first establish a shared vision. We have a one-page road map that portrays a very clear destination for 2020, a clear framework about our strategic pillars and metrics. That road map is actually prepared with our bottlers. It guides all our business planning.

Then it comes to capability. Does the bottler have the capability to execute these plans with us? At the end of the day, we’re trying to create value for the overall system of the Coca-Cola Company and its bottlers, not just ourselves. Otherwise, the system won’t be sustainable in terms of our results.

[...]

S+B: How do you allow a local bottler and local business unit to differentiate the mix of products they offer?
BOZER: We don’t work in a way whereby every time a business unit wants to launch a product, they have to get my approval. Instead, we share the strategic framework. We have strategy discussions and business plan discussions, and we have other guidelines and rules.

For example, it is understood within the group that I want to know your top three priorities. If you want to launch a new product, but you need to take away [resources] from one of those core priorities to launch that product, then you shouldn’t do it. And if your bottler doesn’t have the capabilities to handle that product, you shouldn’t launch it. But if you can figure out how to do all of that in a way that still funds your core, if you have followed the right process, and if you are in the right marketplace with the right capabilities on the marketing side, then by all means go ahead.

[...]

S+B: Have you had much reverse innovation, in which a local group comes up with an idea that you take to other markets?

BOZER: Yes. One innovation that came out of India is the solar-powered coolers. We’re looking to expand that to other markets. There’s great engineering talent in India. Another product that shows promise is Minute Maid’s Pulpy, an orange juice with pulp that did extremely well in China. We expanded it into many countries. We have also taken communications elsewhere. Turkey, for example, had a very successful Ramadan communication to celebrate the holy month in Muslim countries. We took that to other Muslim countries in our group.

S+B: How do you recruit the talent you need?

BOZER: We look for critical experiences and functional competencies. And we ask about candidates: Do they represent the values of the company? We’re about optimism. A pessimistic person wouldn’t work out.

The nationality and gender don’t really matter. On my group leadership team of 18 people, I have 12 nationalities represented, including individuals from Zimbabwe, Scotland, the United States, Turkey, South Africa, India, Croatia, and elsewhere.

The most important competency is leadership. It takes very strong leadership to be able to explain the environment, establish a vision, and rally the troops. Command and control, in most cases, does not work. If you try to control everything, the system won’t work.

You can read the whole thing here.

Ms. Ratna Sahay, Deputy Director of the Middle East and Central Asia Department and head of the IMF mission in Egypt issued the following statement in Cairo today:

“An IMF mission visited Cairo from October 26 to November 3, 2011, at the request of the authorities, to take stock of recent economic developments and assess financing needs. The mission wishes to thank the authorities for the excellent discussions.

“Egypt’s medium-term economic potential is promising. However, maintaining macroeconomic stability and social cohesion amidst modest short-term growth prospects and a weakening external environment remains challenging. The mission welcomes the authorities’ progress towards preparing a homegrown Egyptian strategy to meet these challenges and implement an inclusive growth and job creation agenda. The IMF looks forward to continuing to engage with the Egyptian authorities.”

http://www.imf.org/external/np/sec/pr/2011/pr11394.htm

The first post is by Masood Ahmed, head of the IMF’s Middle East and Central Asia Department, on how to build on the optimism of the Arab Spring and create a more vibrant economy in the region. The Middle East and North Africa has many strengths on which to build: a dynamic and young population, vast natural resources, a large regional market, and an advantageous geographic position with access to important markets. The blog hopes to encourage debate and offer analysis and potential solutions on economic issues, while providing Arabic commentaries on global topics.

The new Arabic-language blog complements the IMF’s English-language blog, iMFdirect—the Fund’s global economy forum.

• During the first eight months of 2011, domestic cement sales jumped by 28.6% compared to the corresponding period of 2010.

• Private sector imports of building materials financed through commercial banks (LCs settled and New LCs opened) increased y-o-y in August by 1.7% and 17.5%, respectively following annual increases of 39% and 15% in July. The growth in the new LCs opened indicates that imports of construction materials will continue its growth over the following months.

• The latest data published by Saudi Ports showed that discharges from construction materials increased 7.8% during the first seven months of 2011 compared with the same period in 2010.

Data from GulfBase.com

Chinese appliance maker Haier Group discovered that customers in one rural province used its clothes washing machines to clean vegetables. Hearing this, a product manager spotted an opportunity. She had company engineers install wider drain pipes and coarser filters that wouldn’t clog with vegetable peels, and then added pictures of local produce and instructions on how to wash vegetables safely. This innovation, along with others including a washing machine designed to make goat’s-milk cheese, helped Haier win share in China’s rural provinces, while avoiding the cutthroat price wars that plagued the country’s appliance industry.

More examples in the full article (registration required).

Conclusions

The paper has laid out our approach for assessing systemic trade interconnectedness using network analysis and the IMF’s DOTS database. Our results uncover several stylized facts offering additional insights into the changing patterns of global trade over the decade 2000-2010.  We also have shown possible applications of our approach to gain a better understanding of trade dynamics across world regions and the overlapping of trade and financial sectors of systemic importance in the top 25 jurisdictions. Our approach lends itself easily to a wide range of analytical exercises addressing specific global trade issues, as well as global (trade and financial) interconnectedness issues.

The use of DOTS has lent robustness to our analysis by providing uniform data for 169 jurisdictions representing almost 100 percent of total world trade in both the year 2000 and the year 2010. Additionally, the quarterly updating of DOTS makes it possible to recalibrate our findings to track global trade developments on a timely basis.

From a policy perspective, jurisdictions hosting both systemic trade and financial sectors would seem to be the natural focus of risk-based surveillance on cross-border spillovers and contagion.  The analysis underscores that these jurisdictions display the strongest inter-sectoral interconnectedness to the global economy. As such, they have the highest potential for transmitting disturbances to other jurisdictions or to systemic stability via either the trade or financial channel or indeed both channels simultaneously. These jurisdictions would thus seem to warrant particular attention and further analysis on the risks associated with their activities, especially when carried out through systemically important financial institutions and nonfinancial corporations.

You can order a print copy here http://www.imfbookstore.org/ProdDetails.asp?ID=WPIEA2011214 or ask us for a PDF copy.

Excerpts:

When King Abdullah bin Saud, the current ruler of Saudi Arabia, came to power in August 2005, he wasted little time in demonstrating his vision for the country’s future. His first official overseas visit, in January 2006, was not to U.S. president George W. Bush, U.K. prime minister Tony Blair, or German chancellor Angela Merkel — but to Chinese president Hu Jintao.

The meeting reflected both countries’ desire to forge closer economic ties. Before King Abdullah went on to other emerging markets, including India, Malaysia, and Pakistan, he and President Hu signed an agreement of cooperation in oil, natural gas, and minerals. This agreement built on existing relationships between the countries’ national energy companies, Saudi Aramco and Sinopec, which had formed a partnership in 2005 to construct a US$5 billion oil refinery in eastern China’s Fujian province. In 2011, they signed a memorandum of understanding to build a refinery in Yanbu, on the west coast of Saudi Arabia. Sinopec is also engaged in a joint venture with Saudi Arabia’s petrochemicals giant SABIC; in 2010, they began producing various petrochemical products in a $3 billion complex in the city of Tianjin in northeast China, and have recently announced that they will build a $1 billion–plus facility there to produce plastics.

[...]

But a closer look reveals a separate trend that could shift the economic focus away from the West. Emerging markets are building deep, well-traveled networks among themselves in a way that harks back to the original “silk road,” the network of trade routes between East Asia, the Middle East, and southern Europe, some dating to prehistoric times and others to the reign of Alexander the Great. Most of these routes were central to world commerce until about 1400 AD, when European ships began to dominate international trade.

Today’s new web of world trade is broader and more diverse than the old silk road. It is a network among emerging markets all over the world, including China, the Middle East, Latin America, and Africa. It is a path not just for expanded trade in goods, but for short-term and long-term investment and the transfer of technological and managerial innovation in all directions. Witness, for example, China’s investments in Africa, where the construction of roads, railways, and communications infrastructure provides revenue to China’s state-owned enterprises and also facilitates China’s access to the continent’s natural resources and its consumers. Or consider the fact that in 2009, China surpassed the U.S. to become Brazil’s primary trading partner; bilateral trade between the two countries grew more than 600 percent between 2003 and 2010, from $8 billion to $56 billion. Also in 2009, the Korea Electric Power Corporation, a state-owned South Korean firm, won a $40 billion contract to build nuclear reactors in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), beating out French and U.S. companies that had bid on the opportunity. And in 2010, Russia and Qatar announced that they would work together to develop gas fields on Russia’s Yamal Peninsula.

[...]

The countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) — Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE — represent one regional powerhouse whose relationships with emerging peers can offer valuable insights into the way such alliances are forming. In the last five years, ties between the GCC and the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) as well as the “Next 11” countries (Bangladesh, Egypt, Indonesia, Iran, Mexico, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Philippines, South Korea, Turkey, and Vietnam) have expanded strongly. (See map.) The speed with which the new silk road is being constructed between the GCC and these other rapidly emerging economies is a clear indicator of the GCC’s rising importance. Even the recent unrest in the Middle East, which included a few of the GCC nations, has not impeded the Gulf’s global ambitions.

[...]

The GCC is also noteworthy because of its traditionally strong relationships with the U.S. and Europe. The Gulf nations have to maintain their relationships with these large but relatively stable economies while fostering new relationships with the high-growth economies in emerging markets. This balancing act could lead to a new set of policies and ambitions in the region, with significant implications for companies that hope to enter this market, and for the nations (which include the U.S., China, Japan, and most of Europe) that compete for the GCC’s oil and gas resources and have a vested interest in ensuring that regional security issues do not destabilize global oil prices.

[...]

The bonds between the GCC countries and the BRIC and Next 11 nations are growing stronger — a development that Western countries to date have viewed with trepidation, fearing that a zero-sum game will leave them cut off from increasingly significant consumer markets and sources of natural resources, goods, and services. But in an interconnected world, unexploited opportunities await players all over the globe.

The fact that these emerging alliances are still in their infancy means that companies and governments in the U.S. and Europe can act now to formulate a response. In doing so, they will need to recognize that the weakening of their own economies during the financial crisis has undermined their historical advantages in the GCC region and has enhanced the appeal of fast-rising emerging markets. To succeed, then, developed economies will need to capitalize on the strengths that their emerging competitors cannot yet match. For example, the U.S. and Europe are still world leaders in terms of building the capabilities and infrastructure that are crucial for innovation, and they have a history of helping GCC countries develop these assets as well. Many of the region’s oil companies relied heavily on contributions from their international partners in their early years, exchanging access to oil resources for foreign talent and technology. This trend continues today: For instance, King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, has formed a partnership with U.S.-based Cisco Systems to create a regional Cisco Networking Academy, which is intended to ensure that the university’s students are prepared to succeed in the digital economy. Companies in developed countries can also build on their extensive global supply chains to easily integrate new partners — whether as suppliers or as customers.

You can check the full text here or ask us for the full text and the infographic.

Excerpts:

During the high-growth years between 1992 and 2007, the globalization of commerce galloped at a faster pace than in any other period in history. Now, amid the chronic unemployment and anti-trade rhetoric of the post-financial-crisis world, some observers wonder whether globalization needs a time-out. However, the experience of multinational companies in the field suggests the opposite. For them, globalization isn’t happening rapidly enough. [...]

The problem is not globalization, but the way our current institutions are set up to respond to this new demand. The prevailing corporate operating model does not work well with the structural changes that have taken place in the global economy.

Most companies are still organized as they were when the market was largely concentrated in the triad of the old industrialized world: the U.S., Europe, and Japan. These structures lead companies to continue building their global strategies around the trade-offs and limits of the past — trade-offs and limits that are no longer accurate or relevant.

One of the most prevalent and pernicious of these perceived trade-offs is the one between centrally driven operating models and local responsiveness. In most companies, an implicit assumption is at play: If you want to gain the full benefits of economies of scale — and to integrate common values, quality standards, and brand identity in your company around the world — then you must centralize your intellectual power and innovation capability at home. You must bring all your products and services into line everywhere, and accept that you can’t fully adapt to the diverse needs and demands of customers in every emerging market.

Alternatively (according to this assumption), if you want locally relevant distribution systems, with rapidly responding supply chains and the lower costs of emerging-market management, then you must decentralize your company and run it as a loose federation. You must move responsibilities for branding and product lineups to the periphery, and accept different trade-offs: more variable cost structures, fewer economies of scale, more diverse and incoherent product lines, and more inconsistent standards of quality.

Some companies try to use strict cost controls to manage these trade-offs. They put in place a decentralized operating model with some central oversight, usually augmented by outsourcing. But this is a tactical move based on expediency, rather than a global strategy. This approach leads to suboptimal results in today’s complex world.

Other false trade-offs are visible in the tension many companies experience between their current business model and the needs of the emerging markets they are entering. They wonder:

• Whether to serve existing customers in their home countries or new customers in emerging countries.

• Whether to meet competitive quality standards demanded by consumers in wealthy countries or offer just the “good enough” features that poorer customers can afford.

• Whether to pursue a strategy of premium or discount pricing.

• How to attract and retain resources and talent, which are perceived as draining away from emerging markets to the industrial world whenever employees are permitted to migrate.

• Whether, in using resources strategically, to follow the typical Western orientation (toward reducing labor and accumulating capital) or the view from emerging markets (where labor is inexpensive, capital is difficult to accumulate, and therefore it is worth investing in building large workforces for growth).

[...]

Many CEOs and top managers are still asking themselves when the bad times will end. No one has the answer, and even in a robust recovery, competition will not slacken. A better question is, What can we do now to establish ourselves in the new global economy? Consumer-oriented companies will need to deliver world-class quality in their products and services, customized for purchasers in multiple locales and circumstances, with significant price reductions (affordable to people at the lowest income levels). They must also provide their customers varying forms of access (owning, renting, or leasing equipment). This cannot be done when a company is striving to balance decentralization and centralization. It can be accomplished only by companies that transcend the old trade-offs and seek operating models that allow them to serve the largest numbers of people while meeting the highest possible standards.

Full article: http://www.strategy-business.com/article/11308