Читать книгу The Emerging Markets Handbook - Pran Tiku - Страница 20

The rich, developed world has reached the peak of its consumption. Its aging population is a demographic time bomb – particularly for Western Europe and Japan. These countries, along with the US, have been the bulwarks of growth led by consumption. Who will replace this population of consumers as they dwindle in numbers?

The logical answer is found in the currently low-consuming billions who live in emerging markets. This is where (in economic terms) the supply and demand curves are likely to intersect over time. The needs of the emerging markets are as wide as they are deep – from improved infrastructure and healthcare to food and education. The hope is that supply of goods and services, and transfer of technology and knowledge (abundant in the developed nations of today), will find its way to the developing world in an orderly manner and enhance the opportunities and living standards of millions.

Multinational corporations today know this. They are feverishly pursuing the markets in emerging countries, and in many cases achieving disproportionate shares of profits from the rising demand that exists there. These companies even recognise that in order for them to prosper it is not sufficient to export goods manufactured cheaply in these emerging countries; they must go beyond that and utilise locally-created human capital and innovation.

Companies from General Electric to Google and Microsoft to Mitsubishi are racing to invest billions of dollars into creating new innovation centres in many of these countries. This is not likely to be a short-term phenomenon, but a process that is decades in the making. The path to growth in many emerging markets is likely to place less emphasis on politics than economics and less on ideology and more on opportunity. It is likely that many emerging market nations will be propelled to achieve in decades what took centuries in the past, given access to modern technological advances.

Today we live in a world where boundaries are blurred by the use of fibre optics and satellites. With these, many faraway areas and underdeveloped countries can bypass the multistage development of earlier years. For example, a country such as Botswana can completely bypass laying cable and landline infrastructures and leapfrog straight to cell towers, making world class communication cheaply available even to poor citizens. In another example, India is developing a state-of-the-art identification system using embedded information chips to protect the identities of its billion-strong population. The process is expected to be completed within a few years.

So, emerging markets are more defined by their trajectory than by their current circumstances, or more by their aspirations than by their accomplishments. Backers of emerging markets are watching and hoping that the progress in many of these countries can be sustained as their populations dream of a better future. Therein lies the promise of emerging countries.

Fortunately, this is a circumstance and an opportunity where most countries can win. The developed world gets what it wants: a large, new body of consumers with rising incomes and aspirations. Emerging countries get what they want too: vibrant economies, rising incomes and living standards, and likely avoidance of social upheaval.