Don't you love the graphic? But, I am afraid, the following paints a very grim picture
The Economist describes a bleak future for multi-nationals with a Trump administration
AMONG the many things that Donald Trump dislikes are big global firms. Faceless and rootless, they stand accused of unleashing “carnage” on ordinary Americans by shipping jobs and factories abroad. His answer is to domesticate these marauding multinationals. Lower taxes will draw their cash home, border charges will hobble their cross-border supply chains and the trade deals that help them do business will be rewritten. To avoid punitive treatment, “all you have to do is stay,” he told American bosses this week.
Mr Trump is unusual in his aggressively protectionist tone. But in many ways he is behind the times. Multinational companies, the agents behind global integration, were already in retreat well before the populist revolts of 2016. Their financial performance has slipped so that they are no longer outstripping local firms. Many seem to have exhausted their ability to cut costs and taxes and to out-think their local competitors. Mr Trump’s broadsides are aimed at companies that are surprisingly vulnerable and, in many cases, are already heading home. The impact on global commerce will be profound.
The end of the arbitrage: Multinational firms (those that do a large chunk of their business
outside their home region) employ only one in 50 of the world’s workers.
But they matter. A few thousand firms influence what billions of people
watch, wear and eat. The likes of IBM, McDonald’s, Ford, H&M,
Infosys, Lenovo and Honda have been the benchmark for managers. They
co-ordinate the supply chains that account for over 50% of all trade.
They account for a third of the value of the world’s stockmarkets and
they own the lion’s share of its intellectual property—from lingerie
designs to virtual-reality software and diabetes drugs.
They boomed in the early 1990s, as China and the former Soviet bloc
opened and Europe integrated. Investors liked global firms’ economies of
scale and efficiency. Rather than running themselves as national fiefs,
firms unbundled their functions. A Chinese factory might use tools from
Germany, have owners in the United States, pay taxes in Luxembourg and
sell to Japan. Governments in the rich world dreamed of their national
champions becoming world-beaters. Governments in the emerging world
welcomed the jobs, exports and technology that global firms brought. It was a golden age.
That is because a 30-year window of arbitrage is closing. Firms’ tax bills have been massaged down as low as they can go; in China factory workers’ wages are rising. Local firms have become more sophisticated. They can steal, copy or displace global firms’ innovations without building costly offices and factories abroad. From America’s shale industry to Brazilian banking, from Chinese e-commerce to Indian telecoms, the companies at the cutting edge are local, not global.
The changing political landscape is making things even harder for the giants. Mr Trump is the latest and most strident manifestation of a worldwide shift to grab more of the value that multinationals capture. China wants global firms to place not just their supply chains there, but also their brainiest activities such as research and development. Last year Europe and America battled over who gets the $13bn of tax that Apple and Pfizer pay annually. From Germany to Indonesia rules on takeovers, antitrust and data are tightening.
Mr Trump’s arrival will only accelerate a gory process of restructuring. Many firms are simply too big: they will have to shrink their empires. Others are putting down deeper roots in the markets where they operate. General Electric and Siemens are “localising” supply chains, production, jobs and tax into regional or national units. Another strategy is to become “intangible”. Silicon Valley’s stars, from Uber to Google, are still expanding abroad. Fast-food firms and hotel chains are shifting from flipping burgers and making beds to selling branding rights. But such virtual multinationals are also vulnerable to populism because they create few direct jobs, pay little tax and are not protected by trade rules designed for physical goods.
Taking back control
The retreat of global firms will give politicians a feeling of
greater control as companies promise to do their bidding. But not every
country can get a bigger share of the same firms’ production, jobs and
tax. And a rapid unwinding of the dominant form of business of the past
20 years could be chaotic. Many countries with trade deficits (including
“global Britain”) rely on the flow of capital that multinationals
bring. If firms’ profits drop further, the value of stockmarkets will
probably fall.What of consumers and voters? They touch screens, wear clothes and are kept healthy by the products of firms that they dislike as immoral, exploitative and aloof. The golden age of global firms has also been a golden age for consumer choice and efficiency. Its demise may make the world seem fairer. But the retreat of the multinational cannot bring back all the jobs that the likes of Mr Trump promise. And it will mean rising prices, diminishing competition and slowing innovation. In time, millions of small firms trading across borders could replace big firms as transmitters of ideas and capital. But their weight is tiny. People may yet look back on the era when global firms ruled the business world, and regret its passing.
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