“Companies Made in Brazil”

Martín Escobari, president of Orange Advisory and Prof. Don Sull from Harvard Business School and member of Orange Advisory’s Board of Advisors are currently working on a major research project: “Companies Made in Brazil”

The authors studied ten Brazilian companies, which successfully transformed themselves to compete globally in the last decade. The results of this project will be published in December 2003.

> The Brazilian Paradox

Brazil is the 9th largest economy in the world, but has disproportionately few world-scale companies. Brazilian companies have faced one of a highly uncertain competitive environment in the last decade. The challenges facing Brazilian companies include: (a) recurrent shocks, (b) absence of long-term industrial policy, sound institutions and access to capital, (c) rapid fall of trade barriers and (d) sub-optimal scale in the domestic market.

> The Study

Despite the structural challenges facing Brazilian companies, we found a select group of companies, which transformed their strategy, operations and financial structures to enable them to compete globally during the last decade. The questions driving our analysis are: How did these companies, against the odds, overcome local obstacles to become globally competitive? Can we pinpoint distinguishing characteristics that allowed these companies to make the leap to global competitiveness that can be applied elsewhere?

> The Standards

Using tough benchmarks we identified a set of elite companies that emerged from Brazil’s turbulent 1990´s as globally competitive. We defined globally competitive as achieving at least one of the following: (a) over-performing international competitors in the Brazilian market, (b) achieving industry-specific operational and financial metrics that are equivalent to the best global competitors, (c) exporting products and services that are competitive in world markets or (d) establishing successful international operations.

> The Comparisons

We contrasted our elite companies with carefully selected companies in their relevant industries that failed to make the leap to global competitiveness. Following the performance of our pairs of companies over ten years, we are discovering the key determinants of success. Surprisingly, some of the findings fly in the face of conventional wisdom and much hyped business concepts imported directly from US business schools.

Download a PDF file to find out more about the project and preview our findings.