mercredi 31 octobre 2007
jeudi 25 octobre 2007
lundi 22 octobre 2007
samedi 20 octobre 2007
La Fiac de retour sur les sentiers de la gloire
À la fois plus jeune et plus mature, cette 34e édition de la Foire internationale d'art contemporain, à Paris, éclipse Frieze la londonienne et se met dans le sillage de Bâle, la référence absolue du marché.
UNE FOIS n'est pas coutume, c'est le retour du beau temps malgré la grève et son chaos. Que d'éloges, quasi unanimes, dans les allées plus aérées de cette 34e Fiac, qui entend défendre les couleurs de la france jusqu'à lundi au Grand Palais, à la cour Carrée du Louvre et dans le jardin des Tuileries (nos éditions du 15 octobre) ! Les 179 exposants venus de 23 pays, soit seulement 42 % de galeries françaises, affichent une franche bonne humeur. Est-ce de l'autopersuasion pour se convaincre que Paris existe enfin, comme jadis, sur la planète art ? Ou est-ce vraiment une réalité tangible, comme en témoignent les affaires soutenues et rapides, comme en témoigne la multitude d'événements artistiques et mondains qui font vibrer la capitale cette semaine, comme en témoignent les 41 achats du Fnac (Fond national d'art contemporain) bien à l'étroit dans son budget de 400 000 eur ? Quand le marchand Hans Mayer de Düsseldorf apporte et vend un Tinguely de légende, couvé des yeux par Suzanne Pagé, qui court toutes les foires et les vernissages pour la collection de la Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris se prend pour Bâle.
À l'heure où le Français Mathieu Mercier inaugure sa rétrospective au Musée d'art moderne de la Ville de Paris, où l'artiste suisse Ugo Rondinone enchante les esprits en jouant les commissaires au Palais de Tokyo et où la magie Giacometti opère à Beaubourg, la Fiac 2007 profite du bouillonnement créatif.
Une palette variée, ouverte, de qualité
En quelques années, l'image de cette foire, qu'on a connue confuse et ronronnante à la porte de Versailles, a bien changé. En un an seulement, sous l'impact tenace du duo Jennifer Flay et Martin Béthenod, elle a su prendre possession du Grand Palais malgré l'architecture écrasante de ce navire de verre et le casse-tête des règles de sécurité. Elle a su aussi prendre une ligne plus claire, quitte à trancher dans le vif et à écarter certains bons exposants (40 nouveaux venus cette année dont 36 étrangers), et imposer une palette variée, ouverte, de qualité, qui correspond à la définition de la culture française. Elle semble bien partie pour retrouver sa place dans la compétition des foires, ces musées éphémères du marché qui se disputent les faveurs des acheteurs hyperactifs, informés et bien conseillés.
« Qualité, diversité et force, le faisceau de convergence est très positif pour Paris, laissant derrière elle la Frieze Art Fair et sa course au superficiel », analyse avec un recul paisible le Suisse Marc-Olivier Wahler, gratifié d'éloges pour son exposition A Third Mind. Signe d'un renouveau ? Nombre de grands collectionneurs étrangers, comme Martin Margulies, le roi de l'immobilier à Miami, dont les Européens visitent l'entrepôt muséal chaque année en décembre pendant Art Basel Miami, se sont abstenus d'aller à Londres pour se ruer sur la Fiac, mais aussi Courbet et le design au Grand Palais. Signe avant-coureur d'une mode qui pâlit ? La grande majorité des collectionneurs français qui se ruaient hier à Frieze, les yeux brillants, se lassent un peu de la frénésie spéculative de l'art dans la City et soupirent d'aise devant une foire qui leur ressemble, plus contemporaine, beaucoup moins moderne malgré les tenors Krugier, les Fleiss et Guillermo de Osma.
« La Fiac est plus à l'échelle de la France ! » répond Donald Rubbell, autre grand collectionneur de Miami attendu comme le Messie, qui a intercalé sa visite entre l'exposition de la Collection Pinault à Lille lundi et les galeries de Berlin hier. « Une très bonne ambiance, une foire de qualité mais encore beaucoup d'oeuvres secondaires », juge ce limier, qui achète en masse l'avant-garde - l'allemande de l'Est puis la polonaise - comme un Saatchi américain.
Collectionneurs californiens
Même si la Fiac 2007 a perdu Barbara Gladstone, reine de Manhattan, et Sadie Coles, la prêtresse du Swinging London, la venue de grands noms a dopé tout le monde. Impact visuel de Paula Cooper avec son très beau stand où trônait un Rudolf Stingel de 2007 comme un papier peint doré. Force de frappe du marché avec David Zwirner, l'Allemand de Manhattan venu avec les splendides stèles de John McCracken et un cabinet de dessins contemporains allant de Marcel Dzama à Raymond Pettibon et Robert Crumb.
Cette Fiac offre, du fait de cette ouverture internationale, des stands de qualité plus qu'enviable. « Les étrangers ne sont pas venus cette fois avec leurs fonds de tiroir pour un petit marché bien français », résume une globe-trotteuse de l'art qui a réussi à faire venir tout un cortège de collectionneurs californiens. Démonstration ? Le public des habitués est resté bluffé devant la confrontation Joan Mitchell-Louise Bourgeois chez Cheim & Read. Devant la table ovni de l'architecte Zaha Hadid chez Ulrich Fiedler, (prototype à 140 000 eur d'une future édition de douze). Devant les Basquiat de Van de Weghe, nom influent de New York (autoportrait au crâne sur fond bleu, peint l'année de sa mort, qui a électrisé Marc et Éric, 39 et 36 ans, cofondateurs d'une start-up informatique).
Les piliers de la Fiac ne sont pas en reste avec quelques accrochages inventifs, forts et inédits. Le Parisien Marwan Hoss avec ses George Segal, émouvantes pièces uniques jamais exposées (350 000 eur Homeless tout seul au fond du stand). La pimpante Nathalie Seroussi avec son show Big is Wonderful. (150 000 eur son Martial Raysse bleu de 1958). Le ténébreux Karsten Greve et sa mâchoire géante en aluminium de Louise Bourgeois (The Mirror, 1998, édition 2/6). Grâce à eux tous, la France a retrouvé ses couleurs.
VALÉRIE DUPONCHELLE ET BÉATRICE DE ROCHEBOUËT
Source: lemonde.fr
vendredi 19 octobre 2007
mercredi 17 octobre 2007
"Soy Cuba", directed by Mikhail Kalatozov (1964)
Four vignettes in Batista's Cuba dramatize the need for revolution; long, mobile shots tell almost wordless stories. In Havana, Maria faces shame when a man who fancies her discovers how she earns her living. Pedro, an aging peasant, is summarily told that the land he farms has been sold to United Fruit. A university student faces down a crowd of swaggering U.S. sailors and then watches friends shot by police when they try to distribute a pro-Castro leaflet. The war arrives on the doorstep of peasants Mariano, Amelia, and their four children when Batista's forces bomb the hills. Mariano wants peace, so he seeks out the guerrillas to join the fight.
(IMDB)
For more information about this movie, I advice you to visit following website:
- Soy Cuba Wikipedia's page
- http://www.brightlightsfilm.com/23/iamcuba.html
lundi 15 octobre 2007
"Der Untergang", from Oliver Hirschbiegel
"Der Untergang" (The Downfall), from Oliver Hirschbiegel, inspired from the book "Bis zur letzten Stunde" from Traudl Junge, with Bruno Ganz, Juliane Köhler and Corinna Harfouch.
In April of 1945, Germany stands at the brink of defeat with the Russian Army closing in from the east and the Allied Expeditionary Force attacking from the west. In Berlin, capital of the Third Reich, Adolf Hitler proclaims that Germany will still achieve victory and orders his Generals and advisers to fight to the last man. "Downfall" explores these final days of the Reich, where senior German leaders (such as Himmler and Goring) began defecting from their beloved Fuhrer, in an effort to save their own lives, while still others (Joseph Goebbels) pledge to die with Hitler. Hitler, himself, degenerates into a paranoid shell of a man, full of optimism one moment and suicidal depression the next. When the end finally does comes, and Hitler lies dead by his own hand, what is left of his military must find a way to end the killing that is the Battle of Berlin, and lay down their arms in surrender. (IMDB)
samedi 13 octobre 2007
lundi 8 octobre 2007
"Good Night, and Good Luck", from George Clooney
Directed by George Clooney with ... George Clooney (O'Brother, Ocean's eleven, etc), Robert Downey Jr. (Gothica, Ally Mc Beal) and David Strathairn.
In the early 1950's, the threat of Communism created an air of paranoia in the United States and exploiting those fears was Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin. However, CBS reporter Edward R. Murrow and his producer Fred W. Friendly decided to take a stand and challenge McCarthy and expose him for the fear monger he was. However, their actions took a great personal toll on both men, but they stood by their convictions and helped to bring down one of the most controversial senators in American history. (IMDB)
My Advice: it is simply GREAT MOVIE !!!
"Hable con ella" de Pedro Almodovar
After "Volver" and "La mala educacion"... here we go with "Hable con ella", direced by Pedro Almodovar with Javier Camara (La mala educacion).
After a chance encounter at a theater, two men, Benigno and Marco, meet at a private clinic where Benigno works. Lydia, Marco's girlfriend and a bullfighter by profession, has been gored and is in a coma. It so happens that Benigno is looking after another woman in a coma, Alicia, a young ballet student. The lives of the four characters will flow in all directions, past, present and future, dragging all of them towards an unsuspected destiny. (IMDB)
My advice: This one is completly different from la mala educacion (not as trash as this one) but romantic like volver.
The feedbacks sequences are very very good and fits percectly the ambiance of the movie.
I really like it, it s very good almodovar... sounds I like this guy lol
samedi 6 octobre 2007
Hot Companies Are Rising From Poor Countries
Street-tough multinationals from poor nations are growing far faster than Western rivals, signaling a major shift in wealth and power.
By Mac Margolis and Rana Foroohar
Newsweek International
Oct. 8, 2007 issue - Not so long ago, big companies from poor nations were generally dismissed as second-rate, run by fat family dynasties or profligate autocrats. Then from the shadows came Samsung, born when South Korea was still considered a poor nation, and now more famous than Sony of Japan—and, since last year, when market cap surged to $103 billion, richer too. In 2004, a Chinese company called Lenovo surprised the world by buying IBM's computer business, and the glass ceiling over emerging-market multinationals started to lift.
Last year Brazil's Embraer overtook Canada's august Bombardier to become the world leader in midsize passenger jets, and Mexican construction-materials maker CEMEX is closing in on titans Holcim of Switzerland and France's LaFarge.
And so the rush is on. Sixty-one of the Fortune 500 companies now come from developing countries, up from 28 two decades ago. These are the new blue chips from poor countries, combining a corporate street savvy, picked up in hardscrabble home markets, with cutting-edge techniques to beat rich-nation multinationals—and grab a growing share of global wealth and power. The total value of emerging-market shares on world stock exchanges surged from $80 billion a quarter century ago to $1.2 trillion in 2000, and has now topped $6.4 trillion on Morgan Stanley's 26-country Emerging Markets Index.
Strikingly, even with the recent market turbulence triggered by the global credit crunch, the new blue chips are proving more stable than the old ones. Antoine van Agtmael, who coined the term "emerging markets" in 1981 and is chairman of Emerging Markets Management LLC (which manages more than $25 billion for institutional investors) cautions that there is froth in emerging markets following the six-year bull run (particularly in China). But the top stocks are still faring well. Consider that this year the S&P 500 is up only 7.98 percent, while the key emerging-market stocks van Agtmael tracks are up 55.37 percent (and emerging markets overall are up 31.85 percent). What's more, the turbulence isn't emanating from the East, as it did during the Asian financial crisis 10 years ago, but from the West. "This time around, the financial indiscipline and lack of respect for risk is not coming from inexperienced emerging institutions, but so-called experienced institutions losing their head," says van Agtmael. "The overborrowing, overconsuming and underinvestment is now in the U.S., while emerging markets are accumulating reserves, building their infrastructure and, to some extent, bailing the world economy out because of their strong demand growth."
Only the smart money has noticed. Though emerging-market stocks represent only a modest 10 percent of world market capitalization, they are gaining ground fast. Together the top 100 companies from the world's fastest-growing economies had combined revenues of $715 billion in 2005, and they are growing 10 times faster than their U.S. counterparts, 24 times faster than Japan's and 34 times faster than Germany's, according to the Boston Consulting Group. Their total shareholder return has jumped 150 percent in the past six years, while the Standard & Poor's 500 Index has declined. "Most people are still oblivious to this new reality," says van Agtmael. "The economic balance of power is shifting to emerging markets, and these new multinationals are becoming the powerhouses of the future."
Though Western investors have been pouring billions of dollars into emerging markets for some 20 years, most still think of the success stories in terms of countries—plays on the rise of China or oil in Russia—not companies. It is long past time, however, to start naming corporate names. So, at NEWSWEEK's request, van Agtmael winnowed down the roster of 25 new multinationals from his recent book "The Emerging Markets Century" (Free Press) to a killer class of 10 from Brazil, China, India, Mexico, South Korea and Taiwan.
Many of the new blue chips were yesterday's sleepers. A few got their start in countries like Taiwan and South Korea, which are no longer fully fledged members of the "developing" class. Others are still nearly invisible, working like ghostwriters for famous brands; Taiwan's Hon Hai (No. 4 on our top 10 list), the world's largest electronics contractor, makes the main components for Dell laptops and iPods for Apple. Others are now global market leaders, like Grupo Modelo (No. 10) of Mexico, whose long-necked Corona beer became a cult brand worldwide and the fastest-growing beer import ever in the United States. And if only an exceptional few like Samsung (No. 1) and Hyundai (No. 2) are household names today, keep watching. "New companies and new brands are appearing all over the world. They now contest the longstanding competitive supremacy of industrialized nations," says Stéphane Garelli, chief economist of the International Institute for Management and Development (IMD), a Switzerland-based business school that measures international competitiveness. "We are moving from the phase of emerging markets to emerging powers."
Indeed, the shift is already well underway. From wardrobes to the workplace, developing-world industries are shaping our everyday lives. The soul of Dell computers is Taiwanese-made microprocessors. Your iPod sings thanks to memory cards by Samsung, whose cell phones and flat-panel televisions also outsell Sony's. The label on the running shoes in your closet may carry a big-ticket logo, but 30 percent of Adidas shoes, 25 percent of Nikes and 20 percent of Reeboks are now made by shadow brand Yue Yuen, the largest footwear maker in the world. White goods maker Haier was little known outside China at the start of the decade; now its wine coolers and mini-refrigerators are staples of college dorm rooms, and in 2004 it made World Brand Laboratory's coveted top 100-brands list. Concha y Toro of Chile, a pioneer in South American wines, has become one of the world's top-selling brands and is the No. 2 import in the United States.
In many ways, the rise of the new blue chips contradicts the clichés about "Third World" business. The lingering conceit is that aside from the famous exceptions, businesses from outside the United States, Western Europe and Japan are still in the infant stages of development, relying on cut-rate labor, the price bonanza for simple commodities like oil, home markets protected by high tariff walls or fast copycatting of more-advanced consumer goods first designed and built in rich nations. None of the companies on our top 10 list made it that old-fashioned way. Instead, they are employing brainpower, winning design, clever management and leading-edge technology that owe nothing to—and increasingly trump—the rich world's legacy brands and corporations.
Interestingly, of van Agtmael's latest top 25, none is from Russia and there's only one from Southeast Asia, while 10 hail from Latin America. The reason has something to do with legacy—Latin America has a fairly long history of capitalism, while other parts of the world have been at it only a couple of decades.
But necessity, not geography, is the true connective tissue—most of the firms have had to overcome some real hardship to get where they are. The currency crises that hit Mexico in 1994, Asia in 1997 and Russia in 1998 killed off weak companies and forced political leaders to push through free-market reforms, selling off state companies, paring corporate debt, eliminating subsidies. But the crucial changes came company by company within emerging markets, which is why they slipped under the global radar. Businesses that had flourished by selling to captive consumers in bell-jar economies folded. Only three of the companies on van Agtmael's list from 1990 still make the cut today. (Remember Daewoo?) The most able learned from dominant multinationals, copied and in some cases surpassed the enemy in ways international markets have yet to fully understand. "What most of these world-class companies have in common is that they survived brutal, sometimes life-threatening crises, which instead of bringing them down made them stronger," says van Agtmael.
Consider Aracruz, a paper company in Brazil, which the World Bank still rates as one of the least friendly business environments on the planet. In the mid-'90s Aracruz was forced to cut its work force by two thirds when a radical economic-stabilization plan caused the country's currency to spike, crippling exports. The company mechanizing tree cutting, outsourcing planting and pouring money into genetic research to boost wood yields, doubling its output per hectare in 10 years. Formerly a bit player in the paper business, it is now the world's largest and most cost-efficient producer of wood pulp for tissue, print and photographic paper.
For many of the new blue chips, poverty is the mother of invention. While many poor nations have failed to build strong energy businesses despite rich hoards of oil and gas, Sasol of South Africa did it in a nation with no petroleum at all. Sasol retrieved a neglected technique to conjure liquid fuel from coal, then figured out how to "scrub" out polluting carbons, and is now the world's largest commercial producer of clean-burning synfuels.
Others succeed by challenging the rich world's rules. For decades, most Third World companies did not invest or borrow abroad because lenders charged them extra interest for hailing from countries considered credit risks. But in 2005, the newly privatized Brazilian mining combine Companhia Vale do Rio Doce (CVRD, No. 8 on our list) took on the ratings agencies, and after months of haggling CEO Roger Agnelli convinced Moody's International that its superlative balance sheet deserved an investment-grade rating. CVRD was the first company ever to reach this milestone before its home country did. Many more have followed.
Hyundai's reincarnation is a symbol of the revival of South Korea, which has left its fellow "tiger" nations in the dust since the 1997 Asian crisis. After flopping in the U.S. car market with its shoddy subcompacts in the '80s and then barely surviving the Asian debt crisis, the company started over. Taking a cue from the Japanese auto titans, it poured money into quality control and design—including the $30 million Hyundai-Kia Design and Technical Center in Irvine, California. Once the butt of American talk-show jokes for its defect-riddled cars, Hyundai this year led a car-owner quality survey and saw its sleek Santa Fe SUV top international models like Toyota's FJ Cruiser and the Jeep Wrangler four-door.
Lorenzo Zambrano knows what it's like to overcome international disdain, too. When his company, Cementos Mexicanos (CEMEX, No. 7), made a play for two traditional Spanish cement makers in 1992, the business world had a good laugh. Cement was a market for heavyweights, the doubters sniffed, not a family shop from Monterrey, Mexico. The talk of the trade was all about when, not if, Zambrano and CEMEX would fail, and which industry titans would end up with the spoils. Some lenders called in their loans, while others charged scalpers' rates to finance his bids. But the Mexicans prevailed. "They thought we were going to be short, with sombreros and pistols," recounts executive vice president Victor Romo, who is more than 1.85 meters tall. "But instead of pistols, we brought computers."
What Zambrano understood is that the cement business is not just about the right mix of sand and gravel, but about delivering the product on demand, on time, anywhere. CEMEX trumped the muscle-bound cement industry by installing GPS equipment in its trucks to speed ready-mix anywhere in Mexico within 30 minutes (it's now called the Domino's of cement). It also created a single worldwide software platform (CemexNet) to allow company managers anywhere to control inventory and production with a few keystrokes. Wired magazine called it "a case study in transforming a hopelessly low-tech enterprise into a model of info-age efficiency." Since the '90s, CEMEX has scooped up assets in 18 countries to become the world's No. 3 cement maker.
Other emerging-market blue chips have become equally bold corporate raiders. Ranbaxy of India bought out nine international companies last year alone, helping it become one of the top 10 generic-medicine makers. In February, Tata Steel of India paid $12.1 billion to beat out a Brazilian rival for control of Anglo-Dutch Corus, becoming the world's fifth largest metal basher. And over the next five years, company leader Ratan Tata plans a series of mergers that would vault his company to the No. 2 spot, just behind ArcelorMittal, which is run by the Indian-born, London-based billionaire Lakshmi Mittal. The mining world is undergoing similar consolidation, with CVRD of Brazil and Russian rivals winning multibillion-dollar bidding wars for industry giants in Canada and other rich nations.
Takeovers predictably spawn "foreign invasion" headlines. But now it's the First World complaining about carpetbaggers from the poorest latitudes. "We've had takeovers before, but in the past they were by U.S. or European firms," says Richard Haskayne, a former top energy executive and the founder of a business school in Calgary, Canada. "But now it's the Brazilians, the Chinese, the Russians and the Indians. I'm annoyed as hell, and I don't know how to stop it." The U.S. Congress thinks it knows how. Citing hazy national-security concerns, Washington's lawmakers barred China from taking over Unocal, a California oil company, in 2005 and last year forced Dubai port operator DP World to sell its U.S. operations. More recently, there's been political grousing over Borse Dubai's bid for 20 percent of NASDAQ. But it's unlikely that protectionism will stem the tide of suitors. "In the globalization era, there are two categories of companies," says Zhang Ruimin, CEO of China's leading household-appliance maker, Haier, which raised eyebrows by making a play for Maytag in 2005. "One is the international company, and the other is the one taken over by the former group. There isn't a third choice."
Of course, no one is writing off the countries and cultures that have ruled the world since the Industrial Revolution. But they could learn from the challengers. One lesson might be to not overlook the world's poorest consumers. While some Western firms have developed innovative products for the poor (think Unilever's single-use soaps and shampoos, which can be purchased for pennies), the new blue chips are ahead on this score. Telecom mogul Carlos Slim turned América Móvil into Latin America's biggest wireless provider thanks to pay-as-you-go cell-phone cards, allowing millions of low-income users to bypass pricey subscriptions. Indian mogul Tata is heading down-market with the forthcoming People's Car. Retail price: $2,500. And South African beer maker SABMiller patched a daisy chain of money-losing breweries across the developing world into the world's second largest beer company. "Coming from the emerging markets, we knew that you can't judge potential by looking just at the current state of affairs," says chairman Graham Mackay.
Ultimately, creating a winning corporation might boil down to a less tangible asset: attitude. "In the developing world, people want to get ahead and they want to develop their country," says Garelli of IMD. "There's an overlap of corporate culture and national culture. In the West, we've totally lost that. The younger generation couldn't care less about the nation—they want a good job."
Of course, there are still plenty of fields that are completely dominated by the West, like financial services and advertising. But in the future, firms will simply be less defined by national identity. Companies like IBM, Google, CEMEX and Lenovo (No. 5) all share a willingness to move business to wherever it's best done. In that sense, at least, the old and new blue chips aren't so different.
With Joseph Contreras in Monterrey and Quindlen Krovatin in Beijing
© 2007 Newsweek, Inc.
Source: Newsweek
Hot Companies Are Rising From Poor Countries
By Mac Margolis and Rana Foroohar
Newsweek International
Oct. 8, 2007 issue - Not so long ago, big companies from poor nations were generally dismissed as second-rate, run by fat family dynasties or profligate autocrats. Then from the shadows came Samsung, born when South Korea was still considered a poor nation, and now more famous than Sony of Japan—and, since last year, when market cap surged to $103 billion, richer too. In 2004, a Chinese company called Lenovo surprised the world by buying IBM's computer business, and the glass ceiling over emerging-market multinationals started to lift.
Last year Brazil's Embraer overtook Canada's august Bombardier to become the world leader in midsize passenger jets, and Mexican construction-materials maker CEMEX is closing in on titans Holcim of Switzerland and France's LaFarge.
And so the rush is on. Sixty-one of the Fortune 500 companies now come from developing countries, up from 28 two decades ago. These are the new blue chips from poor countries, combining a corporate street savvy, picked up in hardscrabble home markets, with cutting-edge techniques to beat rich-nation multinationals—and grab a growing share of global wealth and power. The total value of emerging-market shares on world stock exchanges surged from $80 billion a quarter century ago to $1.2 trillion in 2000, and has now topped $6.4 trillion on Morgan Stanley's 26-country Emerging Markets Index.
Strikingly, even with the recent market turbulence triggered by the global credit crunch, the new blue chips are proving more stable than the old ones. Antoine van Agtmael, who coined the term "emerging markets" in 1981 and is chairman of Emerging Markets Management LLC (which manages more than $25 billion for institutional investors) cautions that there is froth in emerging markets following the six-year bull run (particularly in China). But the top stocks are still faring well. Consider that this year the S&P 500 is up only 7.98 percent, while the key emerging-market stocks van Agtmael tracks are up 55.37 percent (and emerging markets overall are up 31.85 percent). What's more, the turbulence isn't emanating from the East, as it did during the Asian financial crisis 10 years ago, but from the West. "This time around, the financial indiscipline and lack of respect for risk is not coming from inexperienced emerging institutions, but so-called experienced institutions losing their head," says van Agtmael. "The overborrowing, overconsuming and underinvestment is now in the U.S., while emerging markets are accumulating reserves, building their infrastructure and, to some extent, bailing the world economy out because of their strong demand growth."
Only the smart money has noticed. Though emerging-market stocks represent only a modest 10 percent of world market capitalization, they are gaining ground fast. Together the top 100 companies from the world's fastest-growing economies had combined revenues of $715 billion in 2005, and they are growing 10 times faster than their U.S. counterparts, 24 times faster than Japan's and 34 times faster than Germany's, according to the Boston Consulting Group. Their total shareholder return has jumped 150 percent in the past six years, while the Standard & Poor's 500 Index has declined. "Most people are still oblivious to this new reality," says van Agtmael. "The economic balance of power is shifting to emerging markets, and these new multinationals are becoming the powerhouses of the future."
Though Western investors have been pouring billions of dollars into emerging markets for some 20 years, most still think of the success stories in terms of countries—plays on the rise of China or oil in Russia—not companies. It is long past time, however, to start naming corporate names. So, at NEWSWEEK's request, van Agtmael winnowed down the roster of 25 new multinationals from his recent book "The Emerging Markets Century" (Free Press) to a killer class of 10 from Brazil, China, India, Mexico, South Korea and Taiwan.
Many of the new blue chips were yesterday's sleepers. A few got their start in countries like Taiwan and South Korea, which are no longer fully fledged members of the "developing" class. Others are still nearly invisible, working like ghostwriters for famous brands; Taiwan's Hon Hai (No. 4 on our top 10 list), the world's largest electronics contractor, makes the main components for Dell laptops and iPods for Apple. Others are now global market leaders, like Grupo Modelo (No. 10) of Mexico, whose long-necked Corona beer became a cult brand worldwide and the fastest-growing beer import ever in the United States. And if only an exceptional few like Samsung (No. 1) and Hyundai (No. 2) are household names today, keep watching. "New companies and new brands are appearing all over the world. They now contest the longstanding competitive supremacy of industrialized nations," says Stéphane Garelli, chief economist of the International Institute for Management and Development (IMD), a Switzerland-based business school that measures international competitiveness. "We are moving from the phase of emerging markets to emerging powers."
Indeed, the shift is already well underway. From wardrobes to the workplace, developing-world industries are shaping our everyday lives. The soul of Dell computers is Taiwanese-made microprocessors. Your iPod sings thanks to memory cards by Samsung, whose cell phones and flat-panel televisions also outsell Sony's. The label on the running shoes in your closet may carry a big-ticket logo, but 30 percent of Adidas shoes, 25 percent of Nikes and 20 percent of Reeboks are now made by shadow brand Yue Yuen, the largest footwear maker in the world. White goods maker Haier was little known outside China at the start of the decade; now its wine coolers and mini-refrigerators are staples of college dorm rooms, and in 2004 it made World Brand Laboratory's coveted top 100-brands list. Concha y Toro of Chile, a pioneer in South American wines, has become one of the world's top-selling brands and is the No. 2 import in the United States.
In many ways, the rise of the new blue chips contradicts the clichés about "Third World" business. The lingering conceit is that aside from the famous exceptions, businesses from outside the United States, Western Europe and Japan are still in the infant stages of development, relying on cut-rate labor, the price bonanza for simple commodities like oil, home markets protected by high tariff walls or fast copycatting of more-advanced consumer goods first designed and built in rich nations. None of the companies on our top 10 list made it that old-fashioned way. Instead, they are employing brainpower, winning design, clever management and leading-edge technology that owe nothing to—and increasingly trump—the rich world's legacy brands and corporations.
Interestingly, of van Agtmael's latest top 25, none is from Russia and there's only one from Southeast Asia, while 10 hail from Latin America. The reason has something to do with legacy—Latin America has a fairly long history of capitalism, while other parts of the world have been at it only a couple of decades.
But necessity, not geography, is the true connective tissue—most of the firms have had to overcome some real hardship to get where they are. The currency crises that hit Mexico in 1994, Asia in 1997 and Russia in 1998 killed off weak companies and forced political leaders to push through free-market reforms, selling off state companies, paring corporate debt, eliminating subsidies. But the crucial changes came company by company within emerging markets, which is why they slipped under the global radar. Businesses that had flourished by selling to captive consumers in bell-jar economies folded. Only three of the companies on van Agtmael's list from 1990 still make the cut today. (Remember Daewoo?) The most able learned from dominant multinationals, copied and in some cases surpassed the enemy in ways international markets have yet to fully understand. "What most of these world-class companies have in common is that they survived brutal, sometimes life-threatening crises, which instead of bringing them down made them stronger," says van Agtmael.
Consider Aracruz, a paper company in Brazil, which the World Bank still rates as one of the least friendly business environments on the planet. In the mid-'90s Aracruz was forced to cut its work force by two thirds when a radical economic-stabilization plan caused the country's currency to spike, crippling exports. The company mechanizing tree cutting, outsourcing planting and pouring money into genetic research to boost wood yields, doubling its output per hectare in 10 years. Formerly a bit player in the paper business, it is now the world's largest and most cost-efficient producer of wood pulp for tissue, print and photographic paper.
For many of the new blue chips, poverty is the mother of invention. While many poor nations have failed to build strong energy businesses despite rich hoards of oil and gas, Sasol of South Africa did it in a nation with no petroleum at all. Sasol retrieved a neglected technique to conjure liquid fuel from coal, then figured out how to "scrub" out polluting carbons, and is now the world's largest commercial producer of clean-burning synfuels.
Others succeed by challenging the rich world's rules. For decades, most Third World companies did not invest or borrow abroad because lenders charged them extra interest for hailing from countries considered credit risks. But in 2005, the newly privatized Brazilian mining combine Companhia Vale do Rio Doce (CVRD, No. 8 on our list) took on the ratings agencies, and after months of haggling CEO Roger Agnelli convinced Moody's International that its superlative balance sheet deserved an investment-grade rating. CVRD was the first company ever to reach this milestone before its home country did. Many more have followed.
Hyundai's reincarnation is a symbol of the revival of South Korea, which has left its fellow "tiger" nations in the dust since the 1997 Asian crisis. After flopping in the U.S. car market with its shoddy subcompacts in the '80s and then barely surviving the Asian debt crisis, the company started over. Taking a cue from the Japanese auto titans, it poured money into quality control and design—including the $30 million Hyundai-Kia Design and Technical Center in Irvine, California. Once the butt of American talk-show jokes for its defect-riddled cars, Hyundai this year led a car-owner quality survey and saw its sleek Santa Fe SUV top international models like Toyota's FJ Cruiser and the Jeep Wrangler four-door.
Lorenzo Zambrano knows what it's like to overcome international disdain, too. When his company, Cementos Mexicanos (CEMEX, No. 7), made a play for two traditional Spanish cement makers in 1992, the business world had a good laugh. Cement was a market for heavyweights, the doubters sniffed, not a family shop from Monterrey, Mexico. The talk of the trade was all about when, not if, Zambrano and CEMEX would fail, and which industry titans would end up with the spoils. Some lenders called in their loans, while others charged scalpers' rates to finance his bids. But the Mexicans prevailed. "They thought we were going to be short, with sombreros and pistols," recounts executive vice president Victor Romo, who is more than 1.85 meters tall. "But instead of pistols, we brought computers."
What Zambrano understood is that the cement business is not just about the right mix of sand and gravel, but about delivering the product on demand, on time, anywhere. CEMEX trumped the muscle-bound cement industry by installing GPS equipment in its trucks to speed ready-mix anywhere in Mexico within 30 minutes (it's now called the Domino's of cement). It also created a single worldwide software platform (CemexNet) to allow company managers anywhere to control inventory and production with a few keystrokes. Wired magazine called it "a case study in transforming a hopelessly low-tech enterprise into a model of info-age efficiency." Since the '90s, CEMEX has scooped up assets in 18 countries to become the world's No. 3 cement maker.
Other emerging-market blue chips have become equally bold corporate raiders. Ranbaxy of India bought out nine international companies last year alone, helping it become one of the top 10 generic-medicine makers. In February, Tata Steel of India paid $12.1 billion to beat out a Brazilian rival for control of Anglo-Dutch Corus, becoming the world's fifth largest metal basher. And over the next five years, company leader Ratan Tata plans a series of mergers that would vault his company to the No. 2 spot, just behind ArcelorMittal, which is run by the Indian-born, London-based billionaire Lakshmi Mittal. The mining world is undergoing similar consolidation, with CVRD of Brazil and Russian rivals winning multibillion-dollar bidding wars for industry giants in Canada and other rich nations.
Takeovers predictably spawn "foreign invasion" headlines. But now it's the First World complaining about carpetbaggers from the poorest latitudes. "We've had takeovers before, but in the past they were by U.S. or European firms," says Richard Haskayne, a former top energy executive and the founder of a business school in Calgary, Canada. "But now it's the Brazilians, the Chinese, the Russians and the Indians. I'm annoyed as hell, and I don't know how to stop it." The U.S. Congress thinks it knows how. Citing hazy national-security concerns, Washington's lawmakers barred China from taking over Unocal, a California oil company, in 2005 and last year forced Dubai port operator DP World to sell its U.S. operations. More recently, there's been political grousing over Borse Dubai's bid for 20 percent of NASDAQ. But it's unlikely that protectionism will stem the tide of suitors. "In the globalization era, there are two categories of companies," says Zhang Ruimin, CEO of China's leading household-appliance maker, Haier, which raised eyebrows by making a play for Maytag in 2005. "One is the international company, and the other is the one taken over by the former group. There isn't a third choice."
Of course, no one is writing off the countries and cultures that have ruled the world since the Industrial Revolution. But they could learn from the challengers. One lesson might be to not overlook the world's poorest consumers. While some Western firms have developed innovative products for the poor (think Unilever's single-use soaps and shampoos, which can be purchased for pennies), the new blue chips are ahead on this score. Telecom mogul Carlos Slim turned América Móvil into Latin America's biggest wireless provider thanks to pay-as-you-go cell-phone cards, allowing millions of low-income users to bypass pricey subscriptions. Indian mogul Tata is heading down-market with the forthcoming People's Car. Retail price: $2,500. And South African beer maker SABMiller patched a daisy chain of money-losing breweries across the developing world into the world's second largest beer company. "Coming from the emerging markets, we knew that you can't judge potential by looking just at the current state of affairs," says chairman Graham Mackay.
Ultimately, creating a winning corporation might boil down to a less tangible asset: attitude. "In the developing world, people want to get ahead and they want to develop their country," says Garelli of IMD. "There's an overlap of corporate culture and national culture. In the West, we've totally lost that. The younger generation couldn't care less about the nation—they want a good job."
Of course, there are still plenty of fields that are completely dominated by the West, like financial services and advertising. But in the future, firms will simply be less defined by national identity. Companies like IBM, Google, CEMEX and Lenovo (No. 5) all share a willingness to move business to wherever it's best done. In that sense, at least, the old and new blue chips aren't so different.
With Joseph Contreras in Monterrey and Quindlen Krovatin in Beijing
© 2007 Newsweek, Inc.
Source: Newsweek
Hot Companies Are Rising From Poor Countries
lundi 1 octobre 2007
La Bourguignonne
Joyeux enfant de la Bourgogne
Je n'ai jamais eu de quignon
Quand je vois rougir ma trogne
Je suis fier d'être Bourguignon
[ Et je suis fier, et je suis fier ]
[ Et je suis fier, d'être Bourguignon ] (bis)
Au sein d'une vigne
J'ai reçu le jour
Ma mère était digne
De tout mon amour
Depuis ma naissance
Elle m'a nourri
En reconnaissance
Mon coeur la chérit.
Refrain
Assis sous la treille
Plus heureux qu'un roi
Toujours une bouteille
A coté de moi
Jamais j'n'm'embrouille
Car chaque matin
Je me débarbouille
Dans un verre de vin.
Refrain
Madère et Champagne
Approchez un peu
Et vous, vins d'Espagne
Malgré tous vos feux
Amis de l'ivrogne
Réclamez vos droits
Devant la Bourgogne
Saluez trois fois.
Refrain
Ma femme est aimable
Et sur ses appas
Quand je sors de table
Je ne m'endors pas
Je lui dit mignonne
Je plains ton destin
Mais ma Bourguignonne
Jamais ne se plaint.
Refrain
Puisque tout succombe
Un jour je mourrais
Jusque dans la tombe
Toujours je boirais
Je veux que dans la bière
Où sera mon corps
On y mette un verre
Rempli jusqu'au bord.
Refrain
Ou :
Je veux qu'on m'enterre
Quand je serai mort
Près de moi un verre
Rempli jusqu'au bord
J'veux être dans ma cave
Tout près de mon vin
Dans une pose grave
Le nez sous l'robin.
El móvil de Google, más real que nunca
La prensa asegura que el buscador está negociando con tres operadores para lanzar proximamente su terminal en India
Cuando parecía que no se podía hablar de otra cosa que no fuese el teléfono de Apple, vuelve a entrar en escena el GPhone, el móvil que supuestamente está preparando Google. El buscador nunca ha querido hablar de este proyecto, pero debido a un descuido en la filial española, el rumor tomó la dimensión de noticia.
La compañía logró apagar los comentarios apuntando que su negocio no era la fabricación de dispositivos, sino el desarrollo de software. Pero Techcrunh vuelve a la carga y asegura que veremos un GPhone en dos semanas .
La noticia ha surgido de una filtración en India, donde Google parece estar manteniendo conversaciones con tres operadores (Barthi Airtel, Vodafone Essar y la estatal Bharat Sanchar Nigam) para ultimar su lanzamiento.
De confirmarse la información de Rediff News, el GPhone se lanzaría simultáneamente en Europa y Estados Unidos. Google sólo espera la aprobación de las autoridades y estaría dispuesto a invertir entre 7.000 y 8.000 millones de dólares en este negocio.
Todo un competidor para el iPhone.
Source: elpais.es
El móvil de Google, más real que nunca
Cuando parecía que no se podía hablar de otra cosa que no fuese el teléfono de Apple, vuelve a entrar en escena el GPhone, el móvil que supuestamente está preparando Google. El buscador nunca ha querido hablar de este proyecto, pero debido a un descuido en la filial española, el rumor tomó la dimensión de noticia.
La compañía logró apagar los comentarios apuntando que su negocio no era la fabricación de dispositivos, sino el desarrollo de software. Pero Techcrunh vuelve a la carga y asegura que veremos un GPhone en dos semanas .
La noticia ha surgido de una filtración en India, donde Google parece estar manteniendo conversaciones con tres operadores (Barthi Airtel, Vodafone Essar y la estatal Bharat Sanchar Nigam) para ultimar su lanzamiento.
De confirmarse la información de Rediff News, el GPhone se lanzaría simultáneamente en Europa y Estados Unidos. Google sólo espera la aprobación de las autoridades y estaría dispuesto a invertir entre 7.000 y 8.000 millones de dólares en este negocio.
Todo un competidor para el iPhone.
Source: elpais.es
El móvil de Google, más real que nunca
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