An ever-flattening planet leads to market opportunities—and a greater need for Business English—in unexpected corners of the world
Every day, we at GlobalEnglish talk to customers who have made it a strategic priority to embrace Enterprise Fluency™ and equip their employees with the Business English communication skills necessary to conduct global business. The necessity of having this lingua franca is only underscored in a recent article in Smart Money magazine about the changing landscape of “emerging” markets.
Only ten years ago, the term BRIC was coined to refer to the four emerging countries of Brazil, Russia, India and China, predicting that these countries would represent new opportunities for investment in the developing world. This prediction held as these four countries “went from making up about eight percent of the world’s real gross domestic product in 2000 to having a roughly 17 percent share in 2010. … In the first decade of the millennium, China’s Shanghai Exchange more than doubled, markets in Brazil and India quadrupled, and Russia’s main stock index grew by a factor of nine.”
However, although most financial analysts still predict considerable opportunities in these markets, many are now looking to the next generation of emerging markets. “It’s hard to behave like an emerging market when you’ve already emerged,” says Maria Negrete-Gruson of Artisan Funds. The percentage of the equity fund flows into emerging markets has been steadily moving away from the BRICs and into new countries. As such, a new set of acronyms is emerging, including:
- CIVETS—Colombia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Egypt, Turkey and South Africa
- MINT—Mexico, Indonesia, Nigeria and Turkey
- N-11—next 11, includes some of the above plus Bangladesh, Pakistan and the Philippines
What is most remarkable about this list of new countries is that there is hardly a common language among them!
If you thought it was difficult before to do business around the world, try communicating among employees, customers and suppliers in places such as Indonesia, Nigeria and Bangladesh! What this speaks to is a clear and growing solidification of English as the global language of business—there is just no other way to work globally in what is becoming a very diverse set of world markets.
As we reported in the Globalization of English Report, the criticality of Business English is relevant across all industries, organizational levels and parts of the world. Now, with the global market getting more diverse and with more opportunities in these new “emerging” markets, businesses within each of these countries as well as ones looking to take advantage of these growing markets must equip their teams with the tools and training they need to compete.
