Top 100 developing country companies rapidly emerge multinational elite: Boston Consulting Group

30 January 2009

The world's leading multinationals are facing an unprecedented competitive challenge from a new group of fast-globalising companies based in rapidly developing economies (RDEs), according to a report published today by The Boston Consulting Group (BCG).

BCG has identified 100 such challenger companies, with combined 2007 revenues of $1.5 trillion, that are either catching up with or have already overtaken their longer-established rivals in the United States, Europe, Japan, and elsewhere. And if any of these companies stumble and fall during the global economic crisis, there are many others ready to take their places.

The findings in the report-titled The 2009 BCG 100 New Global Challengers: How Companies from Rapidly Developing Economies Are Contending for Global Leadership-serve as a wake-up call for the CEOs of today's corporate giants.

Produced by BCG's Global Advantage Initiative, the report is based on a detailed screening of more than 3,000 companies from rapidly emerging economies to ensure that the candidate companies were truly RDE-based, before applying a set of quantitative and qualitative criteria, including company size.

Finally, it looked at three years of financial data and scored the remaining companies using globalisation criteria, including the company's international presence, its major international investments pursued in the past five years, the breadth and depth of its technologies and intellectual property, and the international appeal of its offerings and value propositions.

In a stark warning, David Michael, the report's coauthor and a BCG senior partner based in Beijing, said: "For those who make the right moves quickly, the challengers could become clients, suppliers, and even strategic partners. For those who don't, the challengers will represent fierce competitors."