In Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon, a classic but fictional town in Minnesota, “all the children are above average.” When it comes to growth in a stagnating global economy, clearly most corporate executives tend to see their own prospects in a similar way. In a recent Accenture study involving 1000 CFOs and CMOs across eight industries and a dozen countries in developed and emerging markets, 85 percent of executives expected their companies to grow at a rate equal to or significantly greater than global growth forecasts.
Digging deeper provides a few more clues as to how executives expect to achieve this growth despite an apparently flagging market. Usually in a period where companies are forecasting growth, pricing power is a critical component. Yet over two thirds of respondents indicated they expect to maintain or further drop pricing, leaving them unable to pass rising commodity costs along to their customers; this trend is heightened when we exclude the energy industry (where, by its nature, input costs are passed directly to the consumer).
Growing, or Not, in an Age of Permanent Volatility
In Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon, a classic but fictional town in Minnesota, “all the children are above average.” When it comes to growth in a stagnating global economy, clearly most corporate executives tend to see their own prospects in a similar way. In a recent Accenture study involving 1000 CFOs and CMOs across eight industries […]
November 02, 2011