A news report came across the wires earlier announcing that the Fed had approved the acquisition of the US branches of the Bank of East Asia by ICBC, the Chinese bank.  This has been a year in the making as we covered back in Jan 2011 in this article. That is when it was announced and the approval has taken just over a year and announced now. Of course, the interesting aspect here is that ICBC is 70+% owned by the Chinese government. We invite our readers here to search this site for the term China to get a ...Read More »

There was a good article in Forbes today that speaks to the real challenge facing organizations today as they attempt to continue searching for ways to increase sales while struggling with the changing environment of social media tools & customer engagement. We still live in a world where many B2B sales and marketing personnel continue buying leads from email and list providers and then use those leads to try and sell.  Reading the article, this cycle will see diminishing value and results. Just as many consumer products and services have turned to the buyer being in charge of the ...Read More »

This week's earnings announcement by Apple highlighted the importance of China in the world market. Their sales success in China this quarter has been hailed by some as the reason Apple was able to beat the numbers this quarter. From the earlier days when the term BRIC was created and emerging markets started to be tracked, we all knew China would grow in increasing importance. And we continue to read examples like the Apple success.  Expect to see the trend continue. Still, many companies have not yet ventured there or still expect that the day of China's equal place at the ...Read More »

One of the tenets of B2B sales and marketing is a focus on various industries and increasingly, services and solutions are tuned to applications that often differ by vertical markets. It makes a lot of sense rather than thinking all geographies have the same make-up and same operations across the globe. To take a look at some differences (and similarities) we took a look at 4 major geographic areas with Global 5000 companies - USA, China, Japan and a group of countries in Europe, UK, France, Germany, Italy and Spain. For each of these, we looked at the total of our ...Read More »

Recently, we added dollar estimates for the amount each company in The Global 5000 spends in three areas - Corporate Training, IT and Marketing. If we look at these three areas, they all represent corporate spending on both internal staff and external products and services ... and offer some of the best opportunities for outsourcing to other businesses. Taking all three of those spending categories and adding them together, we get a total expenditure estimate that shows a market opportunity for industry suppliers. Totalling those dollars up by country can create a targeted priority list of countries with the best B2B ...Read More »

As we explore various aspects of The Global 5000 companies, their size, footprint and spending power is unmistakable. They make the most money and spend the most money compared to any other segment of the market. One area of spending we looked at is IT. Taking available data on the % of revenue spent on IT across a number of verticals, we applied those percentages to the revenue of each company in The Global 5000 database. From there, we totaled those IT dollars for each major industry group. Overall, these represent over $1.2 trillion of IT budgets. Here are the spending totals ...Read More »

In previous posts, we have outlined the size and footprint of The Global 5000 set of companies. The combined revenue of this group of the largest enterprises in the world equates to approximately 2/3 of the world GDP.  They make most of the money in the business world and spend like it too. One of the benchmarks/metrics we have gathered is the corporate spending for training & education by various industry verticals. The level of spending can be a low of $20 per year per employees in the agriculture industry to over $400 in the transportation industry where pilots or engineers are ...Read More »

We have made some significant enhancements to the Global 5000 database including the addition of a $$$ estimate for IT spending on each company record in the database.  Along with this, we have also added a spending estimate for training dollars and marketing spend. Each company record in the Global 5000 has standard data fields for industry, address of HQ, number of employees over 5 years, reported revenue for 5 years. Starting last year, we added a count of employees having LinkedIn profiles for each company and now the addition of spending estimates for IT, Training and Marketing. These estimates were based ...Read More »

As B2B companies look for areas of growth, going global and looking at emerging markets comes to the top of the list these days. The US economy has been on a good run from last year into 2012 but Europe is a big question mark.  Sizing up market estimates, sizes and plans is always a challenge. One metric that can be used is to look at the revenue of the leading companies -- The Global 5000. These companies represent approx $43 trillion of revenue, a major footprint across the globe. If we assume that B2B sales & marketing want to sell ...Read More »

As social media in B2B  continues to evolve, we have added a way to measure and compare the social media involvement of Global 5000 companies. Rather than try to evaluate the corporate presence, we have looked at using the LinkedIn profiles of employees in each of the Global 5000 companies. Using this data and looking across various geographies and vertical markets, provides an interesting perspective of which markets can be more readily engaged and forward looking. This also says a lot about how sales and marketing can connect with their various market segments. We have added a field in the database ...Read More »