The Emerging Markets Century Revisited

The era of emerging markets companies being nothing more than unsophisticated makers of low-cost, low-tech products is rapidly coming to a close. It would be naïve to dismiss them for deriving their competitive advantage "unfairly" from "cheap labour." The "global" financial crisis turned out to be only "halfglobal" because most emerging markets went into the crisis with resilient banking systems and prudent macropolicies. The economic fall-out caused global havoc but emerging markets were "first-in-first-out" and are expected to come out of the crisis with greater respect and one-third of the world's GNP. The greatest corporate victims of the Great Recession were developedmarket icons. Most of the 25 world-class emerging multinationals are escaping the crisis and are getting ready for a post-crisis world in which the American consumer is no longer king.