Playing to Win in Emerging Markets

The 156 executives who completed the BCG Globalization Readiness Survey work for a wide variety of multinational companies. Industrial goods companies employ more than one-third, or 37 percent, of the respondents. Other industries with strong representation in the survey are consumer goods (22 percent); technology, media, and telecommunications (10 percent); financial services (9 percent); and health care, professional services, and energy (each 6 percent). Of the respondents, 30 percent work for companies based in the U.S. and Canada, 49 percent for companies headquartered in Western Europe, 7 percent for companies based in Japan, 3 percent for companies headquartered in other developed Asia-Pacific markets, and 11 percent for companies based in emerging markets.

Nearly half of the executives, or 47 percent, work for companies with annual revenues exceeding $10 billion. One-third work for companies with $1 billion to $10 billion in sales. The remainder work for smaller companies.

We asked executives to answer a few general questions about their companies’ activities across all emerging markets. We also asked them to answer more detailed questions about performance, capabilities, and competition in a single emerging market that was critical to their company and that they felt they understood well. About half, or 52 percent, chose China. Other markets and regions that were heavily favored include Latin America (12 percent); Eastern Europe and Russia, India, and Southeast Asia (each 10 percent); and the Middle East and Africa (8 percent combined). Please note that because these figures have been rounded, they do not add up to 100.

We derived the performance gap by measuring the respondents’ ratings of importance of each of 13 capabilities on a scale of 1 (low) to 5 (high) and each respondent’s company’s performance on the same scale. The performance gap is the difference between their performance and importance scores.