ECOMARK GROUPS

As consumer markets across East Asia falter in the face of an impending world recession, foreign companies – especially consumer goods manufacturers - are increasingly turning to China, whose comparatively robust growth is bucking the global trend. 

While this is likely to make the competitive environment in China even fiercer, it does at least bode well for positive change in the country’s distribution and logistics markets.

In 2008, with China Telecom's vigorous promotion, China's number of IPTV subscribers grew rapidly, up 100% year-on-year. The rapid growth drove the development of IPTV's equipment market, and with the promotion of free and bundling marketing, subscribers in Shanghai, Zhejiang, Fujian and Guangdong have taken shape. However, telecom operators have found it difficult to gain profit in IPTV. In 2009, because of global financial crisis, telecom operators' capital and resource investment in IPTV promotion will meet tests. How to guarantee the IPTV market's sustainable development has become the whole of the industrial focus for IPTV.

In a recent Ecomark global survey of leading companies that are experienced at outsourcing, virtually 100 percent of respondents told us that while cost reduction remains an important driver, by the third year of a typical multiyear outsourcing arrangement, they had also explicitly linked business objectives and business outcome targets to their programs.

We surveyed nearly 600 companies across five industries and found an important shift in the expectations companies have for outsourcing. Clearly, the traditional role of outsourcing—as a narrowly focused exercise in cost control and labor arbitrage—is not adequate to the task of achieving the kind of broad business outcomes that customers expect.

Apple Computer, Google, Samsung, 3M, Virgin Group, Nokia, Procter & Gamble. For these top performers, the winning equation is unassailable: Innovation equals growth.

The proposition is a bit more complex than that, of course. To make profitable innovation happen consistently, companies must turn penetrating insights into products, services and experiences that appeal to customers, and then combine them with sophisticated development and commercialization capabilities. In addition, successful innovation requires the ability to break into new business arenas that are ripe for growth and to manage a changing enterprise ever more effectively. Moreover, our concept of innovation extends beyond new offerings and new businesses to include new management methods, approaches to selling and other aspects of business.