In this business tv show, international business experts Stephen Philips, Chief Executive, China-Bri...
In this business tv show, international business experts Stephen Philips, Chief Executive, China-Britain Business Council, Ian Coleman, Partner, Head of emerging markets, PricewaterhouseCoopers UK, and Chris Runckel, President, Runckel and Associates, talk about looking beyond the balance between risk and reward, because there's a great deal more to choosing the best destination.
Ian Coleman: People often ask me what is the next hot destination and the next hot emerging market and I don’t think there’s a simple answer to that. Why? Largely because of something I said earlier about the need to balance risk and reward. It’s relatively easy to look at that on one dimension and say which of those high risk countries, where’s the highest physical risk, a lot of people look at that. It’s equally as easy to look at population demographics, look at expected inflation rates, to look at the economic growth potential of different companies but its bringing those two things together that I think is very important.
Stephen Phillips: Clearly a lot of early international investment in China went to the eastern coastal board with the ever keen eye on cost production. Some of that is moving to countries like Vietnam and other countries in Asia but some of that is also migrating in china to the Hinterland to the west of China or to the North east of China so it’s a much more complicated dynamic than just investments having gone into China and then moving into further countries and there continues to be a great deal of new investment going into China as well but many businesses obviously have to look at the bottom line and they will go to places, a) where they can get the lowest cost production and b) where they can find the right skills.
Chris Runckel: Right now Vietnam is one of the lowest cost areas out there but that cost will erode over time and then I see India probably even in the future Bangladesh coming up for locations for low cost factories and Vietnam just like china will have to start making ...