Gaining a new or stronger foothold in key emerging Asia markets – primarily China, India and Vietnam is a key priority for many SMB’s. These SMB’s face substantial challenges to maintain sales and margin potential, changing and diverging needs to new competitors and breakthrough technologies. Infinite Sum supports companies in the food, ingredients and CPG industries in capturing new opportunities in emerging markets. We work collaboratively with our clients to deliver profitable growth, while also ensuring a sustainable business model.
In many emerging markets today, many SMB companies in their prior haste to enter these same markets, ended up working through a large number of unqualified distributors to get their products to a hugely fragmented customer base of small indepentant retailers. This makes efficient distribution and coverage very difficult if not impossible, and it can be expensive and difficult to obtain any beneficial visibility of the customer and the end consumer.
Taking the plunge and expanding in to an international market can be a somewhat daunting challenge for SMB’s and even many large corporate organisations. Despite globalisation, there are still some major difficulties in competing internationally which do not exist in the domestic market. Gaining an understanding of the changing nature of the international trading environment and identifying larger strategic (global) and more “local” market trends can have a major impact on a company’s decision making when considering export or other forms of internationalisation. There are also the individual country social and cultural considerations which effect customer/buyer/partner behaviour and how we approach international markets.
The political, economic, environmental, legal and social structure of a country, along with its level of technological advancement, should be carefully assessed in order that the international market provides a synergy with the requirements of the business and that this can deliver the required return on investment.