Alibaba, Tencent, Dr. Reddy's, Uniqlo, lotte, Vinamilk...Never heard of them?
Watch out! A wave of "emerging global brands (EMCs)" from Asia will hit the Western market rather soon and you'd better know something about them starting from now on, warned a Dutch researcher.
"Hundreds of Asian companies will reach out to the world and enter the global market. At this moment, these new companies are relatively unknown in the West. This will rapidly change," said Professor Dr. Rien T. Segers at the International Business School of Hanze University of Applied Science in Groningen, a city in the north of the Netherlands.
The professor of Asian Business Strategies is to publish a book on EMC in October, in which Alibaba, Geeley, Haier, Huawei, Lenovo and Tencent from China, Dr. Reddy's and Infosys from India, Panasonic, Rakuten and Uniqlo from Japan, Lotte from South Korea and Vinamilk from Vietnam are selected cases to demonstrate strategies and endeavors of "promising future economic giants" to conquer the world.
SOME ARE FASTER
Alibaba, Huawei, Lenovo, Haier, Uniqlo are faster emerging companies from the region. They have already "emerged", most other companies are slower, said Segers in an interview with Xinhua.
In his opinion, Geely, a Chinese automotive manufacturing company, is a little bit slower but has a smart strategy. "They have bought Volvo but they keep quiet about this. They leave Volvo on its own but at the same time they are profiting from the experience and the branding of Volvo."
Tencent, a Chinese investment holding company providing mass media, entertainment, internet and mobil phone value-added services, is also slower according to the professor. "It takes a bit more time but it will come," he said.
Based on the studies of these six Chinese EMCs, Segers argues that the static thinking of China as the workshop of the world is to be deconstructed because the situation in East Asia is changing day by day.
"That does not mean that the workshop as such is coming to an end, it means that at the same time enormous innovations are coming up, the technological distance of sophistication between Chinese companies and American companies is getting smaller and smaller," he explained.
Uniqlo, the Japanese casual-wear designer, manufacturer and retailer, is "very fast and already established around the world". Rakuten, a Tokyo-based e-commerce and internet company established in 1997, has registered a revenue of 5 billion US dollars in 2013. "It is a promising emerging startup," said Segers.
Panasonic, Sony and Toyota are all well-established brands but facing difficulties due to the competition in South Korea and China. "So they have to reinvent themselves, they are emerging in this particular sense," said the professor.
He rejects the "cliche" that Japan is an old-fashioned country. "If you look at the country you see high-talented graduates from university starting a company which grows in five years into a huge thing. So there is an enormous vitality and drive to make something happen."
The two Indian companies, Dr. Reddy's and Infosys, have "a time difference of 7 to 8 years to catch up with Chinese EMCs" but the pharmaceutical brand [Dr. Reddy's] is very interesting for the West, because western insurance companies and medical institutions are looking for drugs that are much cheaper than the drugs coming from the United States and Switzerland. "So there is a huge chance for those relatively unknown companies to become really world brands," he said.
