Standing on the Sun. Christopher Meyer

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СКАЧАТЬ market simply could not be served profitably, a homegrown firm called Bharti Airtel was doing just that. Its approach to fulfilling the same basic market need that Vodafone had recognized differed in almost every conceivable respect. Bharti was the first mobile company to outsource everything except marketing and sales.⁵ It obtained network operations services from Ericsson, business infrastructure from IBM, and transmission towers from an independent company that had grown up to build infrastructure for all the mobile competitors. Bharti also discovered a great way to lower the costs of managing customer relationships: get rid of them, by marketing prepaid phones. By eliminating much of the cost of billing and customer support, by using shared infrastructure, by paying Ericsson by the minute for network operation, and by buying rather than building business systems, Bharti was able to serve customers—131 million of them as of 2010, compared with 427 million for Vodafone across thirty-one countries—with about one-tenth the capital investment of Western providers.

      No one would call Bharti's business anything but capitalist. But at the same time, no well-trained and well-practiced capitalist in first world mode would have created it, because it dispenses with scale, capital intensity, and customer loyalty as sources of competitive advantage. Serving large, low-income markets is just not the same.

      Grameenphone, a business founded by Iqbal Quadir in 1999, underscores this point. With a mission and model now broadly celebrated, Grameenphone brought phone service to the poorest corners of Bangladesh, today distinguished by the world's lowest ARPU—and did so profitably. Grameenphone is our first case of a mixed-value company, an idea we take up in chapter 7. This means that even though it was designed to turn a profit, it was founded to produce social value. “In Bangladesh, a cell phone is like a cow,” Quadir has said. “An essential piece of capital equipment.” His underlying motivation was to provide a key component of the infrastructure that could help some of the world's poorest people improve their quality of life and begin to lift themselves from poverty.

      To do that required the invention of a new distribution system and a new financing apparatus. Quadir created a plan that brought together Telenor, the Norwegian national phone operator, to invest in the network, and Grameen Bank to provide microfinancing for the handsets (not an obvious strategy in 1999). No developed economy provided the model of the “village phone lady,” an entrepreneurial entity on the most humble level imaginable. And none offered the tools of microfinance, which made it worthwhile for lenders to dispense the tiniest of loans for capital equipment, probably because no one with global-scale capital to lend conceived of the handset as a piece of capital equipment. Once you have that perspective, you can imagine that the phone will produce income, reducing the financial risk; that the buyer has an incentive to grow usage in her village, increasing ARPU; and that financing is as appropriate at this scale as it is for any business's capital equipment.

      The growth and character of consumption in the emerging economies are only half the story of why capitalism will increasingly be rooted in their soil and compelled to adapt. Production skills and capabilities to meet that demand domestically are also rising rapidly. Pundits love to cite the masses of engineers being churned out by Indian and Chinese universities, and sometimes those numbers are disputed given uneven interpretation of what really constitutes a trained engineer. But less arguable is the trend of Western multinational corporations establishing R&D centers in emerging markets. And still more convincing is the rising number of multinationals headquartered in emerging economies. Every year, the Financial Times publishes its FT 500 of the world's largest multinational firms. Between 2006 and 2008, the BRIC representation on this list more than quadrupled, from fifteen to sixty-two.⁶

      What does the repotting of capitalism in new territory mean for the shape it takes? It means quite a bit, because geography is a matter not only of longitude and latitude but also of history and culture. The various societies of the world have their different ideas of fairness, social equity, the value of transparency, and the role of government. Traveling in 2009, Chris had a fascinating reminder of this in the space of one day. He picked up a newspaper as he left Mumbai to go back to Boston, and read about one implication of the Indian Congress Party's election triumph: the fact that the new administration would need to reshuffle federal ministries out of obligation to its coalition partners, because certain ministries offer richer opportunities for bribes. (Bureaucrats dealing with the telecom industry, for example, enjoy access to particularly deep pockets.) This transitional challenge was reported without a trace of opprobrium, essentially in the way one might find an American business page story reporting on negotiations of acquisition terms and conditions between Hewlett-Packard and Palm.

      Ten hours later, having endured the forced march through high-end retail that is Heathrow's terminal 5, Chris picked up a London paper and saw a very different tolerance for governmental grubbing. The news was full of the expense scandal in Parliament, some MPs having crossed the line in terms of which personal expenses could be considered to have been incurred in the course of their work and charged to taxpayers. Still later, having arrived on U.S. soil, he saw a news report in which strenuous objections were being made to U.S. oil industry executives' even being present in meetings focused on policy making.

      In short, different attitudes prevail toward government and the state, the desire for wealth, and the rule of law. All these things vary with the cultural heritage of a society. This is why the R in BRIC has turned out to be silent: Russia's cultural heritage turns out to be a major impediment to its economic progress.

      We have a theory as to why Western managers have been slow, in general, to recognize the implications of the emerging economies' growing scale and sophistication: it's because they set the changes in motion, first, in the offshoring wave, and then in the outsourcing wave, for purposes of their own. If you look at the business press coverage of the 1980s, it is clear how managers regarded these economies then: simply as sources of cheap labor. This was the decade of Ross Perot's “giant sucking sound”—the noise he perceived as jobs rushed out of the United States into post-NAFTA Mexico.

      It wasn't until the 1990s that the role played by emerging economies expanded in the eyes of Western managers, and, even then, it was only to see them also as markets: buyers as well as makers of Western goods. Multinational consumer goods companies cast a hungry eye on those tens of millions of new middle-class consumers, whose numbers, as a direct result of offshored production jobs, were rapidly swelling.

      It is only in the past several years that we have seen leading multinationals shift their perspective on emerging economies as themselves sources of innovation, much of it better suited to local markets and some of it destined to take on the world. Fortune 500 companies now have ninety-eight R&D facilities in China, and sixty-three in India. GE's health care group built its largest facility in Bangalore.⁷ When Hewlett-Packard opened its newest research center in June 2011, it chose to put it in China. HP CEO Léo Apotheker told reporters, “It is in China, for China, but also for the world because the R&D capabilities here in China we want to leverage for other markets as well.”

      The old mental model has persisted in some quarters, long after the BRICs were declared to be rising powerhouses. In many minds, the mature economies of the West remain at center stage; other nations are the cheap labor to produce its goods, the new markets to buy its goods, and the new adherents to the Washington Consensus. Practitioners of capitalism in these countries have their own perspectives, though, and it does not consign them to such minor supporting roles.

      This, in fact, is the big news about the emergence of those economies—news that most managers in mature economies are missing. They have a sense of foreboding that we are entering some kind of new epoch, which some like to call “post-American,” in which the lion's share of global wealth creation will no longer be accounted for by the United States. They worry that U.S. firms, as their nation loses its 800-pound gorilla status in the global economy, may see their dominance threatened. They suspect that worldwide manufacturing and marketing will no longer revolve around the tastes of the U.S. consumer. But they haven't pondered the higher-level effect: the vibrant economies СКАЧАТЬ