Emerging market firms positioned to lead

The Boston Consulting Group has a new report out, The New Global Challengers: How 100 Top Companies from Rapidly Developing Economies Are Changing the World.

Until recently, only a dozen or so companies based in rapidly developing countries could be described as emerging global challengers. Today there are hundreds, which is in line with the expectation that by 2050 China and India will be two of the world’s three largest superpowers…

Emerging global companies from RDE’s are going global because they’re focused on organic growth but find that their home markets either don’t have the scale or the resources to allow them to deliver the levels of shareholder value and competitive advantage they want to achieve, according to the report. They aim globally to tap into new profit pools or gain long-term access to raw materials. Eighty-eight of the RDE 100 are seeking the former, 12 the latter.

BCG has picked 100 of these top performers, dubbing them the RDE 100 – that’s ‘rapidly developing economy.’ Of these, 70 are from Asia (China has 44, India 21) and 18 from Latin America. RDE 100 companies’ portfolios contain $520 billion in fixed assets, and, in 2004, they employed 4.6 million people with a payroll of $20 billion. – purchasing $200 billion a year in raw materials and energy, $50 billion in parts and components and $40 billion in services.

For more, see the press release. More comment over at IEM.