July 26th, 2010, by: Peter Storm
“It’s the economy, stupid” was a phrase in American politics widely used during Bill Clinton’s successful 1992 presidential campaign against George H. W. Bush. The phrase was intended for internal campaign use to remember the team of the importance of the economy as one of their top-3 campaign speaking points. The other two being change and health care. So we can safely conclude that 18 years later that change is hard and takes time. A lot of time.
Take the time you need for your changes but rest assure that todays global Talent will not wait for you. For Corporations and FDI the future is Talent. Everewhere for everyone – from all Western developed economies to India and China. My recent conversations with global strategy managers and facility planners from DELL, GE, Nokia, RioTinto and Google confirm this picture. They know it is about talent. Their global resource allocation strategy gears towards talent, away from “just” labour and cost arbitrate. What I found intriguing is that GE and Nokia have moved to a strategy to select locations for their global operations where they can establish (lead, dominate) a favourable talent eco-system. They choose to work with FDI-promotion agencies in their long-listing process that understood and actively supported them in this process.
Are you ready to compete for talent – by creating your own global talent supply chain or support your investors with theirs?
Curious to hear from you if you believe that the future of FDI is about something completely different or talent done different. Welcome your point of view.
Article tags: corporate resource allocation
Posted in: Talent
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June 22nd, 2010, by: ruud.storm
Traditional economies (Europe & North America) face huge budget deficits that need addressing; governments need to (and will) run down their budgets. But this mechanism automatically reduces autonomous growth, so how to keep your economy running? The drop of the Euro (from 1.50 to the dollar to 1.20) is generally welcomed as a tool to increase export, and export is certainly contributing to economic growth.
We at Global Arena see export and FDI related; often companies start to export their products to other countries and continents, and only after prolonged success they consider shifting (part of their) production to these export countries. With our GlobalArenaRank methodology we can support companies in their location analyses, to make sure they expand their activities to countries and regions that best serve their needs and expectations.
Article tags: Export, FDI Strategy
Posted in: Export, FDI business
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May 29th, 2010, by: Peter Storm
If you are managing an Western FDI Agency that you are likely in this situtation; you face a rapidly increasing demand for FDI inflow combined with short term significant pressure on your FDI Agency budget.
And not to forget to further complicate the situation you’re in; competition is increasing globally and heating up fast?
What could you do if you recognize this pattern as the situation you are in or heading towards?
In my point of view this scenario most likely applies to most Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) promotion agencies globally. The current global ecomonic environment and situation is to complicated to assume that there is a one-size-fits-all problem and solution. But I believe that 80% will face this pattern of budget pressure already or very soon while having to deliver more FDI results at the same time in a more complex, more competitive and larger market due to the changing patterns in global FDI flows.
Now I worry about this as well as a business leader, even though our marketplace for global business locations provides a solution exactly to this problem. My interpretation is that innovation is hard and takes time to get adopted – even online innovation. I experience the FDI market appears largely as a conservative market – in particular in Europe. That is why it will be hard for most agencies to deliver what they need to in the near future. The good news is that there are proven solutions on the market that will support you with the transformation of your agency and FDI business model.
European government budgets (lets not forget the USA) are under more pressure every day, as governments realize that over spending and government lending have painful limits in uncertain markets. The need for Foreign Investments is mounting rapidly. FDI agency executives need a plan to cut budget and get more results delivered fast in a generally soft FDI market where companies are very cautious with strategic investments.
I recommend a strategy that is focused on;
- intelligent online promotion (cheeper than anything else)
- pro active investor acquisition (most effective but also most complex)
- transform the agency from volume processing to value creation (the only way to cut budget while increading output)
This requires that you can change your organization to become the leader in these areas. We know how to do that and have the services you need to implement this fast.
Do you have a different perspective on where the industry is heading? I welcome your point of view.
Posted in: FDI business
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May 19th, 2010, by: Peter Storm
I just talked to a potential client and he raised the following challenge: “I believe it may be easier/more effective to buy some keywords in Google such as “FDI” and “Europe” to increase the visibility of our website.”
That’s a very valid and important question. Would it? I am sure it could but it would cost you a fortune and huge management effort to control the Adwords budget and keyword selection and placement positioning. Not because Adwords is difficult but because FDI is VERY GENERIC. Google would love you for placing that keyword – axe your Adwords credit line and you would end up competing heavily for FDI add placemen at high cost and marginal effect. Not a good idea at all.
What would work is that we agree with you – our Investment Promotion Agency or Location Promotion Agency client – to place Adwords against your profile page on Global-Arena.com. That would bring more effect and more impact for less cost. Way less. And, not at last, we could also tell you by our extensive ongoing FDI research what keywords fit your location advantages and investor acquisition strategy and in what countries it should run. It requires a lot of FDI global market insight to do this right. And that’s the only option you have considering the drain potential of this instrument on your marketing budget. Adwords the Tyrannosaurus Rex running around in your marking budget and department. Its impressive but hungry all the time.
I could go on for another 2 pages on this great topic in more relevant detail. We should. We will dive in to it in more detail in next articles.
Cheers – time to go to bed.
Posted in: Uncategorized
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May 18th, 2010, by: Peter Storm
If we do the right things than what is going on at the FDI Marketplace matters to you our clients and users.
Some things you notice like more countries and more locations. Other things are equally important but take a bit of time and effort to experience; for instance that our Google Pagerank is rapidly improving. Global-Arena.com is on a steady and fast track to become a global top-100′000 website this summer. Nice – so what – you may think. Good to know that what this means is that our clients, your clients, can find us and your location easier in their Google Search queries. That matters a lot I trust. They find you when it matters most – when they need you.
I wanted to share a preview of our new FDI Site Search system but it appears we have to fix something on the Blog system first. Stay tuned for the preview.
Peter
Posted in: global-arena.com
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April 21st, 2010, by: kris.mattens
When a company is looking for a business location to set up new operations or to expand its business, decision makers have to take several macro-economic location factors into account in order to make sure the general macro-economic environment provides the necessary fundamentals for stability and to ensure the company’s long-term continuity and profitability together with the necessary elements for sustainable growth for its business.
Several criteria determine a location’s overall potential to attract foreign direct investment. First of all, the necessary economic criteria need to be fulfilled for a company in order to take a specific locality into consideration. These vary from favourable and competitive labour costs, a high workforce productivity, favourable capital and fiscal incentives under the form of reduced taxes and capital grants to support innovation initiatives, to high quality infrastructural requirements that offer not only the necessary ICT infrastructure that is vital for information transmission but also provides the transportation means that are crucial for workforce mobility (road and rail infrastructure, the vicinity of airports, etc.).
Secondly, talent criteria are crucial for the company’s decision-making process: the proximity of a large pool of skilled labour is a factor of utmost importance for the company’s long-term growth, profitability and is of utmost importance to ensure a continuous innovation potential necessary to obtain competitive advantages. Not only the structure and size of the labour force in the potential location or region are of crucial importance but also the quality of education, mostly characterised by the presence and proximity of universities, centers of excellence, research and science.
Finally, several location parameters define an area’s general attractiveness: demographic factors are of a tremendous importance since large populations provide the necessary market to sell goods and services and create environments with a good chance of rapid market penetration. Furthermore, highly politically stable areas with low degrees of corruption are a cost reducing factor. Moreover, skilled labour force tends to be attracted to localities with a high standard of living, prevalent in areas with a high quality of life.
The highest probability of finding a company’s ideal combination of all fore mentioned location decision factors exists in large metropolitan areas. Over the last decades, large metropolitan areas continuously seem to develop all the right fundamentals for companies to flourish, which in turn continues to attract talented workforce. As a consequence, metropolitan areas increasingly attract foreign direct investment, and will eventually be able to (re)shape a large part of a nation’s economy. Moreover, large metropolitan areas tend to merge and some even become cross-border. Do recent projects such as Yongsan e.g. prove that metropolitan areas will eventually play the most important role in attracting foreign direct investment and in the end become more important than nation states themselves?
In case you might need more information on this topic, please feel free to visit our FDI Marketplace.
Article tags: Metropolitan areas
Posted in: Metropolitan, business locations
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March 30th, 2010, by: ruud.storm
During our presence at MIPIM 2010 we saw a lot of cities and area’s present themselves as a Metropolis. When can we mark a city as a Metropolis? I think the Wikipedia entry helps:
A metropolis is a big city, in most cases with over half a million inhabitants in the city proper, and with a population of at least one million living in its urban agglomeration Big cities belonging to a larger urban agglomeration, but which are not the core of that agglomeration, are not generally considered a metropolis but a part of it. A metropolis is usually a significant economic, politicalcultural center for some country or region, and an important hub for regional or international connections and communications.
Why do you want to present yourself as a Metropolis? Because it helps to attract investors!
Standard criteria in Location Strategy are Infrastructure, available workforce, available education and an economy that wants to buy or use your products. Without further investigation, you may expect these criteria to be met in a Metropolis. Of course we advise to properly investigate at the FDI Marketplace
What we considered a new trend is that some city’s, formerly competing to attractinvestors, joined forces and presented themselves as a Metropolis, consisting of various agglomerations and the open space in between was advertised as green area, adding to the attractiveness of living there. Some even had a crossing border component (eg Copenhagen-Malmo-Gothenburg). Now the challenge lies in not only presenting several cities as one Metropolis, but also acting like one; is there a single point of contact where investors get the needed information and later the needed assistance to set up a new location? Investors prefer one-stop-shopping, certainly in the location analysis and descision phase.
Article tags: MIPIM 2010
Posted in: MIPIM 2010
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March 11th, 2010, by: Peter Storm
We are very pleased that many FDI and real estate executives accepted our personal invitation to hear how we connect FDI with real estate projects and opportunities at Global-Arena.com
At MIPIM we will also publish the findings of our market research on global FDI networking communities and platforms.
I hope that MIPIM is an opportunity to meet face to face.
kind regards
Peter Storm
Posted in: Uncategorized
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February 22nd, 2010, by: martine.goossens
Understanding marketplace positioning is crucial; Whether referring to traditional business and marketing strategies or online strategy… Call it what you want; marketplace analysis is crucial for business strategy development and critical to business margins. Gathering FDI insight is therefore -or should be- established as an ongoing process in the Foreign Direct Investment decision making process.
Marketplace analysis and systematic development of FDI insight helps identify opportunities for growth from discovering gaps in the market that competitors aren’t exploiting. In strategic terms, marketplace analysis helps identify gaps where customer segments aren’t well served by existing propositions.
Despite all the rich data available from web analytics and media consumption, companies and their decision makers do not dispose over the necessary tools to structure all available data! It seems to me that this core part of FDI decision making is often hindered due to the fact that multi dimentional managerial input cannot be reduced to an objective one dimentional managerial output.
On Global–Arena.com we give our users acces to GlobalArenaRank, the scientific algorithm developed to identify business locations which best meet the differing requirements of parties -FDI supply and demand- involved in Foreign Direct Investment initiatives. GlobalArenaRank draws upon a large amount of data from authoritative sources and reduces it to relevant results only using statistical reduction methodology.
The GlobalArenaRank scientific algorithm calculates rankings of countries within their regions, and of locations within their countries. GlobalArenaRank also drills deeper into locally-specific rankings of locations which have upgraded their profile presentation through purchase of Global Arena’s premium FDI Marketplace services.
On our website users assign their own weightings to any combination of nine location factors – Labour Cost, Labour Productivity, Infrastructure, Education, Labour Availability, Labour Market Flexibility, Market Attractiveness, Socio-Political Stability and Cost of Living – to receive an overview report that shows rank by country and lists locations within each. From here, users can start to access deeper levels of information and perform systematic business location search and analysis.
Companies from all sizes can now conduct their own resource allocation and location longlisting processes without the need for subscription based expensive online FDI data analysis systems and or FDI services from location consultants or global consultancies. Global-Arena.com saves you time and money while providing you the best answers when you need them for your business needs.
We hope this helps your company or location compete effectively in the global economy.
Posted in: Uncategorized
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February 11th, 2010, by: Peter Storm
Today I had an interesting conversation with a FDI thought leader and market expert. We both sensed that we do not yet see much movement in the FDI market. It led us to the question, are companies on the fence or even already planning for site related cost cutting or consolidation?
True or not true, it is an interesting challenge for any Investment Promotion Agency to have Investor Relationship Management in place such that you could engage proactively. You may not be able to stop it but you can influence or at least learn from their decision making to understand how that might be related to your competitiveness.
I think that you will most likely not get an early inside lead, that would allow you to influence company decision making.
What you can do is use your Investor Relationship Management process, combined with the right Insight about your competitiveness, to maintain a systematic dialogue with your customers to pick up warning signs and certainly also feed them systematically with positive information concerning your global competitiveness.
You all know how hard, labour intensive and expensive it is to maintain clear line of sight of your global competititiveness, not to mention pick up key trends early (positive and negative).
We can at a unique price point because we apply our GlobalArenaRank Insight globally. We are interested to discuss with you how this Insight could be applied most effectively in your Investor Relationship Management.
Of course this is not relevant if business is booming in your area. Is it?
Posted in: Uncategorized
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