North American Business Press
About the Book
In this vital book, visionary international investment manager Antoine van Agtmael -- the pioneer who coined the term "emerging markets" -- pulls back the curtain on the new powerhouses of the world economy. Picking up where Thomas Friedman's The World Is Flat left off, he persuasively demonstrates that the world's center of gravity is already tipping decisively in favor of the emerging economies. With this seismic shift, competitive challenges and investment risks are also being dramatically transformed, while new opportunities are arising for those who are alert to them.A new breed of world-leading companies are catching their Western competitors off guard. Household names of today -- IBM, Ford, Sony, and Shell -- are in danger of becoming has-beens as these more innovative new superstars in the emerging markets claim dominance. Understanding how they have become world-class market leaders, and where they are taking the world economy, is crucial to understanding not only the future of globalization, but the future of Western competitiveness.Each year we are buying more planes from Brazil's Embraer, refrigerators from China's Haier appliance maker, smart cell phones from Taiwan's HTC, and gas from Russia's Gazprom. How have these relative unknowns come so far in the world markets so fast? What are they doing right that their Western competitors are doing wrong, and how can Western companies face the intensifying challenges and survive?With in-depth, inside knowledge of these emerging powerhouses that's based on his thirty years of working, traveling, and investing in emerging markets and his extraordinary access to the leading companies, van Agtmael trains his experienced analyst's eye on twenty-five of the top emerging giants, taking readers into the executive suites and labs where they are outmaneuvering their Western rivals. Profiling these major players, such as Korea's Samsung Electronics, China's computer maker Lenovo, Brazil's iron ore giant CVRD, and India's Infosys, van Agtmael divulges their strategies for growth, and analyzes how their rise to dominance will change our lives. His unique insights point the way to how we in the West can capitalize on the opportunities these companies represent while also mobilizing a powerful response to the challenges they present.The Emerging Markets Century is a compelling and necessary read for anyone who wants to understand the true magnitude of change under way in the global economy today.
About the Author
Antoine van Agtmael is a founder of and chairman and chief investment officer of Emerging Markets Management, L.L.C. (EMM), one of the world's leading investment management firms for emerging market equities. Based in the Washington, DC, area, the firm has more than $10 billion under management. He also is a director of the Strategic Investment Group. Before founding EMM in 1987, Mr. van Agtmael was deputy director of the Capital Markets department of the International Finance Corporation (IFC), the private sector-oriented affiliate of the World Bank; a division chief in the World Bank's borrowing operations; managing director of Thai Investment and Securities Ltd. (TISCO), Thailand's leading merchant bank; and vice president at Bankers Trust Company.Mr. van Agtmael is the author of The Emerging Markets Century (Simon & Schuster, January 2007), Emerging Securities Markets (Euromoney, 1984), and co-editor of The World's Emerging Stock Markets (Probus Publishing, 1992). While at IFC, he coined the term emerging markets and founded the IFC Emerging Markets Database. He has been an adjunct professor at Georgetown Law Center and has taught at Harvard University's Institute of Politics and at Thammasat University in Bangkok.Mr. van Agtmael is a trustee of The Brookings Institution and chairman of its International Advisory Council as well as a member of its executive and investment committees; chair of the NPR Foundation; a member of the board of NPR; and a trustee of the Washington National Opera. He is also a member of the President's Council on International Activities at Yale University; the Advisory Council of Johns Hopkins University's Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS); and the Council on Foreign Relations.Mr. van Agtmael holds an MBA from New York University, an MA in Russian and Eastern European Studies from Yale University, and a BA in Economics from the Netherlands School of Economics.
