Global warning
How to Avoid Getting Burned in the Globalising Business Services Market.
Friday 30 May 2014Report
The B2B Services sector is diverse but contains some of the world’s most successful businesses. Leading players are capitalising on waves of outsourcing, acquiring to accelerate their growth, and stock markets are increasingly recognising their attractive combination of cyclical resilience, forward visibility of earnings, and growth potential. However, beneath the sparkling track record and immense potential, there are some difficult questions that CEOs and shareholders increasingly need to address.
One of these is about how best to exploit international opportunities: which countries to target, in what order, and how? To identify the long-term success factors, OC&C has drawn on its experience of helping a range of incumbents and insurgents develop winning strategies, and created a database to examine in detail 200 of the top global firms in B2B (a group we refer to as the B2B 200). Collectively it’s a powerhouse group, turning over £1.4 trillion annually, present in every continent, and including leading businesses from Construction, Engineering, HR, BPO and other B2B sectors.
The findings from analysing the data on the B2B 200 has provided several key insights …
Read Publication
Suggested Reading
Consolidation prize
B2C Services is big business – around £80bn in the UK alone – but in contrast to retail, most B2C services markets are highly fragmented: the top players in aggregate often account for less than 20% of share, and independents thrive
Higher and higher
As Western economies are showing hesitant growth paths and uncertainty is freezing investment plans, growth options are dwindling for multinational companies (MNCs) and many heads are turning to China
Pricing for profit
Companies tend to set their prices too low in the business-to-business market. Regardless of pricing policy, some customers end up paying a price that is not justified by the amount they buy or the costs that they incur
Show of strength
Twelve months ago we compiled an Index evaluating 50 of the leading FM businesses in the UK, aiming to spark some debate, particularly as FM is rarely seen as a coherent industry – even by many participants
The new rules of law
Historically, legal has not been a primary lever of bottom-line improvement strategies. This is understandable