November 7, 2007—Expert corporate real estate and site selection panelists at the recent CoreNet Global Summit in Atlanta identified the up-and-coming cities that are expected to be the economic hubs of the future, beyond the well-known hotspots of Shanghai and Bangalore. In a session called “Around the World in 90 Minutes,” panelists picked dozens of cities in Asia, Europe, and the Americas that offer a business climate that makes them ripe for development by growing companies.
When selecting European locations for manufacturing centers or Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) offices, Ren Buck, President of Buck Consultants International, advises companies to look for three differentiators before citing a new European facility; talent, technology, and connectivity.
Buck, whose firm is one of Europe’s leading independent location consulting companies, said emerging business centers like Glasgow/Edinburgh, Scotland and Istanbul, Turkey are among Europe’s brightest future development stars. But he added that Sofia, Bulgaria is “on the rise and will attract a lot of new companies.”
A prominent Asia expert, Dennis J. Meseroll, Director of Tractus Asia Limited, a location consulting firm, said companies should look to second and third tier cities that he calls “sleepers,” which include Chengdu, China; Orissa, India; and Ho Chi Minh City/Hanoi, Vietnam.
Despite the attractiveness of exotic new Asian and Eastern European markets, Dennis Donovan, Principal of Wadley-Donovan-Gutshaw Consulting, said North, Central, and South America, “continue to be very strong,” for outsourced call centers and manufacturing centers. Donovan, a renowned site selection expert, calls places ranging from Dickinson, North Dakota to Hermosillo, Mexico to Santiago, Chile among the hottest future investment hotspots in the Western hemisphere.
Donovan told session attendees that, “Honduras is competitive with China on cost,” and suggested companies look at similar locations for their relative political and currency stability, as well as a strong pool of bilingual workers.
Despite upsides like a well-trained labor market or relatively low wages, the panelists all warned companies about to plunge into new markets to avoid such pitfalls as herd mentality, making location decisions on country-level data, relying on secondary data, regulatory change, and others.
A recent CoreNet Global location decision survey indicated that North America remains the market of choice, followed by emerging markets such as Eastern Europe and Asia. For more information, see the CoreNet Global Web site.
