AMERISOURCE BERGENEVENT, Charlotte, NC – MAY 1, 2012
Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Amerisource Bergen Chief Marketing Officer, Gina Clark.
GINA CLARK: Okay, welcome back. Great start to the morning. So now we have the pleasure of having Jeffrey Garten, the former Undersecretary of Commerce for International Trade and the Juan Trippe Professor of International Trade, Finance and Business of Yale School of Management to be our next speaker. At the intersection of global politics, economics, investment and financial markets, there are few people who can surpass Jeffrey’s insight and high level experience. As Undersecretary of Commerce for International Trade during the Clinton administration, he helped US companies access foreign markets, especially the emerging markets of China, India and Brazil – you heard us talk about those just this morning. Garten also spent 13 years on Wall Street as the Managing Director of Lehman Bros. and the Blackstone Group. During this time he specialized in debt restructuring in Latin America and restructured some of the world’s largest shipping companies in Hong Kong. Additionally Garten is the author of 5 books including The Big Ten, Emerging Markets and How They Will Change our Lives, and Politics of Fortune, a New Agenda for Business Leaders which the Washington Post has said, “the book that every CEO in America should read.” Jeffrey’s commentary and analysis have also appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, Newsweek, Harvard Business Review, and Foreign Affairs. And you may have heard of his wife, Ina, better known as “The Barefoot Contessa.” Please join me in welcoming Jeffrey Garten.
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When I introduce myself as the husband of the Barefoot Contessa, I’m guaranteed a good reception. You know it’s not so easy being her husband because for every hour you spend eating her food you need at least 2 or 3 hours of exercise and people who have never seen me beforealways wonder how come I am not blown up like a balloon. And what they don’t realize is that actually I have very good metabolism and I exercise a lot. I should be rail thin and what you’re seeing here is really much more than the weight that I actually should be.
It’s a great pleasure to be here today. I have been asked to talk about globalization and sort of how it relates to you. And as you know, this is an enormous subject and I could go on for a long, long time talking about globalization, but what I’m going to promise you is something that’s much shorter. Now some of you are probably thinking that a lot of people say that, and then they just go on and on and on. I don’t know how many of you are old enough to remember the Latin American dictators who used to start a speech at 2:00 in the afternoon and somewhere around 8 or 9 in the evening they haven’t even gotten to their conclusion. But I’m not going to do that because I was once really seared by the experience of being in an audience and hearing someone say I’m going to be really short and then he went on and on and on. In fact, the guy went on so long that somebody in the audience got up and started to walk out. And the speaker, being kind of egocentric, stopped and pointed at the guy as he was leaving. “Excuse me, sir, where are you going?” the speaker asked. And the fellow turned around and said, “I’m going to get a haircut.” The speaker couldn’t believe it! He said, “You’re going to get a haircut? Why didn’t you get a haircut before you came?” And the guy looked at him and said, “I didn’t need one before I came.”
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I’m going to talk for a while and then we’re going to have a panel and the panel is going to engage a little bit with what I said and then we’re going to bring you into that.
I want to start with just a little bit about the environment for globalization, the world economy that we’re in. Then I want to talk about some key trends that I think are really important to you. I’d like to then discuss the implications for any global strategy that you might have. And I’ll say at the outset I’m going to strike a very cautionary note. And then I’d like to talk about the features that I think that make a great global company, some of the features you might want to think about if they don’t already characterize you. And then finally I’d like to end up offsetting my cautionary view about the next few years with something that’s much more optimistic in terms of where the world economy is headed over the longer term.
Current Environment
So I’ll start with the environment and make two points really. The first is that there is very little visibility in terms of what the world economy is going to be over the next couple of years. We are still in the wake of the financial crisis and still in the wake of the aftermath of the great recession. As a matter of fact, we have a two-track global economy. We have very slow growth in the advanced industrial countries and we have much faster growth in the developing world and one big question, which nobody can really answer, is the nature of the link between these two. Is it possible that the developing countries can somewhat decouple from the West, with their dynamism and their growth continuing to grow? Or is the world so integrated that there really is no great growth scenario for the developing countries unless they can sell to us? And there is lots of debate about this; I’m not going to try to resolve it. Only to say it’s very foggy in terms of what the next couple of years are going to look like.
But that’s not all. We still have an enormous amount of financial fragility. It is a vast overstatement to say that the financial system has healed itself. In fact, nobody knows the answer to this question, but we may be on the cusp of a major financial crisis emanating from Europe. On the other hand, we just might skirt it. No one knows.
So this issue of little visibility is obviously a critical ingredient in thinking through any strategy at least in the medium term.
And there’s even a bigger trend and I would say that way to describe this is that the world is in a major transition from one order to another. The old order was one in which the United States and Europe basically governed the world, set the rules, enforced the rules such as they were. It was an order in which the rest of the world aspired to adapt a system that was very much like the US and Europe. That order is in the process of crumbling. And nobody quite knows what the new order will be like.
One way to kind of understand this is to think about what happened when the world that had been governed by Britain gave way to a world that was really centered on the US. That transition happened in the first half of the 20th century. But it happened amidst enormous chaos because that baton between one leader and another is never passed smoothly – never has been in history. What I am saying is that in addition to the sheer economic uncertainties, we have enormous political uncertainties as well.
Megatrends/Next Two Decades
What I’d like to do is kind of peer through these sort of megatrends and give you a little more precise picture of what I think is going to characterize the next decade or two. And the word I’d like to use, the word that sums all this up, is the word “supercycle.” I think that we are in what is called a supercycle and that this is one of the few supercycles that has existed in the last couple of centuries. A supercycle is a major historical transformation in which there are enormous shifts in economics, in politics, and in social values. Everything shifts. For example, the source of demand shifts. The way money flows, new investment patterns – they also change. New technologies emerge. There are huge social movements in a supercycle and there are new political and geopolitical arrangements.
There have only been two supercycles in the last 500 years. One was the industrial revolution, which started in England and came to the United States and just as one little indication of that, we were an agrarian society with 98% of our population living on the farms. We ended up as an industrial society with only 2% of people living on the farms. And yet, we acquired massive productive agricultural capability. So the industrial revolution was one supercycle. The other one was right after World War II, when all of Europe and Japan were decimated, and when those countries came back very strong, regenerating an enormous amount of industry and productive capability.
So what is this supercycle that we are in right now? How would you look at it? One thing you would look at is the rise of emerging market economies. We are clearly seeing a major shift of economic forces from the west to the east and the south. Just ten years ago, less than 35% of the global GDP was centered in emerging markets and today it’s over 50% and climbing. In fact, emerging market nations are growing 2 to 3 times as fast as the west and Japan. And at a time when people around the world are becoming much more productive, we are going to increase world population in this century by over 3 billion people. All but 100,000 are going to be in emerging markets.
When I say emerging markets, I think of a few things that are directly relevant to every global company. One is the rise of the middle class. If you go back 30 years and forward 30 years, you take those 60 years, 5 billion people will entered the global middle class. This will have constituted an enormous appetite for goods and services of the kind that the world has never seen – and that’s why this is a supercycle. And if you add to that the hyperurbanization that is taking place – just for example today, 180,000 people moved from the countryside to the city. Now how do I know it’s 180,000? Because it averages 180,000 people moving from the country to the city every single day for 40 years. Or to put it another way, the world is urbanizing to the tune of 6 New York Cities every year. Now that’s not necessarily new cities – that can be expansion of old cities, but for the first time in history, most of the world is headed towards urbanization. And when you add this to the middle class anyway, what you have here is almost an unlimited demand for all kinds of goods and all kinds of services – whether it’s housing, transportation, health care, education. This is growth in demand which is almost beyond imagination in the next several decades. It also brings a whole host of problems as well. Pressure on the globe’s resources, in urban areas the communication of diseases and the acceleration of crime. So we’re obviously entering a new kind of world, but I think on balance, it’s a world of considerable opportunity.
Now when I say that emerging markets are arising, I’m also talking not just about their markets, but also about their companies. We are seeing the growth of global companies coming out of developing countries in a way nobody could possibly have envisioned just ten years ago. In every single area, western companies are going to face excruciating competition from companies whether they’re from China or India, or Indonesia or Africa; it doesn’t matter, they’re coming from everywhere. And the reason that they are is that their own countries have been liberalizing, but maybe more significantly it has become so easy to get capital, to get technology, and to get talent.
So the first feature of the supercycle is emerging markets. The second is a big structural change in the developed world. It’s no secret that whether we talk about the US or Japan or Europe, there is a massive deleveraging of debt that is taking place and that will continue to take place in my view for the next decade at least. Now what is this deleveraging mean? It means that the national finances of all of these countries are going to undergo a major transformation. We will see the slashing of budgets, the drastic reduction of all kinds of subsidies for energy, agriculture, national health care systems, and we’re going to see the very substantial raising of taxes. We’re also going to see enormous focus on dealing with aging populations. The US has many of these problems but on a relative basis we look reasonably good! Now you could look at this one of two ways – you could say this is an enormous downer. This is a recipe for slow growth and recession. Or you could say that in fact, we are on the cusp of releasing a tremendous amount of new energy. And I think it’s the latter and I think the United States is actually going to be taking the lead and those people who are extremely pessimistic are going to be proved wrong. Because I think that in the effort to deal with our debt, we’re going to unleash a massive amount of creativity and innovation and private initiative. And the US is going to lead here, we’re going to lead first of all in the area of energy where in the next ten years or so we’re going to separate ourselves from Middle East energy, and begin to be a major exporter of natural gas ourselves. I think we’re going to lead in the return of a lot of manufacturing, particularly very highly sophisticated manufacturing.
And I think just behind usis going to be Japan. When the sky is darkest, people are really missing the opportunities, but I think that what we’re going to see because Japan is under so much pressure, I think we’re going to see the advent of a society in which dealing with the aged is going to become a growth industry. And Japan is going to open up; it is going to become a much more integral part of Asia. It is going to release the energy locked up in its closeted services, and I think that in Europe, under all the pressure that exists, is going to emerge a European Union that is smaller and much more integrated than it is now. It won’t have Greece, it may not have Portugal, it may not even have Spain. But what is left is going to be a real dynamo. So I think that in this supercycle – and none of this is going to happen in the next few years – we’re going to see enormous release of initiative and innovation from the developed world forced by having to deal with the excruciating debts.
Now the third theme of the supercycle is what I would call more globalization. Everywhere you look the world is becoming smaller and more integrated. Whether it’s complex supply chains; whether it’s the massive amount of money that is moving across borders no matter how regulations are put up; whether it’s the Internet and all the social media, the world is being subject to more and more globalization. And I think that this too is going to create a new energy and a new set of opportunities for businesses around the world. It’s also going to result in a level of hypercompetition that we have not seen in our lifetimes. Because companies like yours will not just be competing with other western companies, but as I mentioned before, what I like to call emerging blue chips, multinational companies coming out of emerging markets, are going to put up an enormous fight – within their countries, within other emerging markets, and also as they come into the US. Because I think that the essence of this increasing globalization and more competition is going to be far more incoming investment in the US than we have ever seen. We’re going to need the money; it’s going to be part of our deleveraging. And rather than companies being our paper, buying our securities, they’re going to come into greenfield Investments and they’re going to be making an enormous number of acquisitions because they have the funds and they have the wherewithal to do it.
In this supercycle there’s going to be also a lot of shifting politics around the world. There’s going to be a recipe for a lot of confusion, but also another way to release a tremendous amount of energy because right now over the last several decades under the auspices of the US we had a very kind of predictable system of capitalism with basically one set of rules that everyone was adhering to. I think we’re going to see a lot more diversity now, and while that’s going to be a real headache in terms of planning a corporate strategy, it’s also going to unleash a lot of new ideas, a lot of new techniques, and we’re going to go from something that is more tightly controlled to something that is much more decentralized. It used to be that we had a world that was more or less governed by the US and then it was the US and Europe and Japan, and now it’s the US, Europe, Japan and a number of emerging markets, and that sheer diversity in my view is going to create a number of business opportunities.
Now let’s look at the implications here. To me, one of them is that the medium-term looks dicey but the long-term looks good. The next three to five years, just to take an arbitrary period of time, is one of great uncertainty and great volatility. I think it’s akin to going into a long wind tunnel – you can see the light on the other side, but when you’re in that tunnel, youare being thrown from pillar to post. I think another analogy would be that the next few years constitutes a real obstacle course. Because everything I said in the short-term translates into things that you can’t predict, a ball that is bouncing in a way that you just don’t know. I mentioned the possibility that we may be on the precipice of a Euro crisis, but you know there are a lot of other things in the air that I think also could put a monkey wrench in the wheel. For example, all the major central banks in the world have lowered interest rates almost to zero. And if they haven’t already, they’re moving in that direction. There is so much liquidity in the world, there is almost a certainty in my view that sometime in the next couple of years, there’s going to be a massive tightening and when that happens, interest rates are going to go higher or, if the central banks wait too long, we’re going to find ourselves in a global inflationary environment far more dramatic than anything we’ve seen since the 1970’s. This isn’t the end of the world, but all I’m saying is the next 3 to 5 years this is not a scenario in which you want to be caught in and in which it’s easy to plan.