The World-Wide Expansion of Commerce and Industry

Today's BusinessWeek Online contains an article titled "The New Multinationals" which focuses on the relatively recent emergence of successful multinational corporations from developing countries, and describes the new approach these companies have to doing business as well as the profound effect they are having on the global marketplace. Here are some interesting excerpts:

These new contenders hail from seemingly unlikely places, developing nations such as Brazil, China, India, Russia, and even Egypt and South Africa. They are shaking up entire industries, from farm equipment and refrigerators to aircraft and telecom services, and changing the rules of global competition.

. . .

What makes these upstarts global contenders? Their key advantages are access to some of the world's most dynamic growth markets and immense pools of low-cost resources, be they production workers, engineers, land, petroleum, or iron ore. But these aspiring giants are about much more than low cost. The best of the pack are proving as innovative and expertly run as any in the business, astutely absorbing global consumer trends and technologies and getting new products to market faster than their rivals.

. . .

Over the next decade, the World Bank projects, developing nations' share of world gross domestic product is expected to grow from one-fifth to one-third. During the next two decades, predicts Goldman, Sachs & Co., China, India, Brazil, and Russia alone will add to their populations some 225 million consumers who earn at least $15,000 a year. That's more than the combined population of Germany and Japan.

The fruits of these developments-- such as increased economic opportunities in developing countries, a more equitable distribution of global resources and greater diversity and representation in the field of international commerce-- seem clear. Yet in the absence of a unifying System of values greater than those provided by materialism, the specter of exploitation, inequality and excess still looms large. In the matchless prose of Shoghi Effendi:

Surely the world, contracted and transformed into a single highly complex organism by the marvellous progress achieved in the realm of physical science, by the world-wide expansion of commerce and industry, and struggling, under the pressure of world economic forces, amidst the pitfalls of a materialistic civilization, stands in dire need of a restatement of the Truth underlying all the Revelations of the past in a language suited to its essential requirements. And what voice other than that of Bahá'u'lláh -- the Mouthpiece of God for this age -- is capable of effecting a transformation of society as radical as that which He has already accomplished in the hearts of those men and women, so diversified and seemingly irreconcilable, who constitute the body of His declared followers throughout the world?