One company that is holding its own despite the shaky economy is Peoria, IL-based Caterpillar, Inc., which reported an enviable quarterly profit thanks to growth in emerging markets. The world’s largest manufacturer of construction and mining equipment is benefiting from growing mining and energy operations with orders outpacing shipments to dealers. Additionally, Caterpillar plans to increase production during the second half of 2010 and has hired 3,650 new employees this year — 1,250 in the United States and 2,400 overseas.
Caterpillar, which laid off 30,000 employees globally from late 2008 through 2009, is being cautious, saying it still has “significant economic concerns.” Eli Lustgarten, an economist with Longbow Research, notes that “Construction in developed countries is not doing well, particularly in the United States.” Caterpillar is well aware that its second-quarter profit of $707 million was derived from sales which rose 116 percent in Latin America and 62 percent in the Asia/Pacific region.
Another company that is prospering is Boeing, which has delivered 191 Next Generation 737s so far this year, including 95 in the second quarter. Chicago-based Boeing has delivered 222 airplanes in 2010. Demand for single aisle planes comes not only from growth markets, but also for replacing older aircraft such as the 737 Classics, A320s, and McDonnell Douglas MD-80/90s. The demand for single-aisle airplanes remained strong even during 2009, according to Boeing. The growth of low-cost carriers, emerging intra-China demand, and a large need for replacement airplanes will keep the demand for single-aisle airplanes strong into the future.
“The world market is doing much better than last year, but there are still challenges,” said Randy Tinseth, vice president of marketing, Boeing Commercial Airplanes. “Looking at 2010, we see a world economy that continues to recover. We expect the world economy to grow above the long-term trend this year. As a result, both passenger and cargo travel will grow this year.”
It’s ironic that — even in the depths of the Great Recession — the number of millionaires around the world grew by 17 percent to 10 million. Their collective wealth surged 19 percent to $39 trillion, according to the latest world wealth report from Merrill Lynch-Capgemini.
Jones Lang LaSalle and LaSalle Investment Management have noted reasonable improvement in global market transparency, according to their recently released 2010 Commercial Real Estate Transparency Index.
Breakthrough ideas that change industries are increasingly coming from the developing world rather than the United States or Western Europe. Part of this is due to the fact that the West is outsourcing more research and development to emerging markets. Currently,
London has overtaken Washington, D.C., as the preferred city for commercial real estate investment,
With U.S. unemployment figures approaching 10 percent, it has affected parts of the tech industry with the chip and system design areas among the most affected (unemployment is 8.6 percent among American software engineers although the overall tech sector is faring better with an unemployment rate under five percent).
But all is not rosy for India. While the country has surged in the basic and mid-level areas of coding and development, it has struggled in the area of R&D and top-end innovation. India produces about 300,000 computer science graduates a year. Yet it produces only about 100 computer science PhDs, a small fraction of the 1,500 - 2,000 that get awarded in the United States or China every year according to a recent article from
founded in 1988, is so substantial that they are “poised to overtake Nokia Siemens as the world’s second-largest maker of telecom hardware, after Ericsson.” In fact, “one out of six people on the planet use Huawei hardware”, but most consumers outside of China can barely pronounce the name, let alone recognize the company’s products. Huawei’s problem? According to
compared with last year. Second-quarter totals for EMEA markets are down 24 percent from the first quarter to just $17.3 billion, a 71 percent drop from 2008. The good news is in the Asia Pacific markets, where RCA projects an 18 percent gain over the first quarter with a total of $23.3 billion in sales, approximately half of the second-quarter worldwide numbers.