China’s slowing. Russia’s flailing. Is any emerging market worth putting your money in? We’ve found seven of them.
There was a time, not so long ago, when it seemed the rugged promise of the globe’s economic frontier could be summed up with a simple acronym: BRIC. To investors and corporate prospectors alike, Brazil, Russia, India, and China were like Gold Rush towns high in the hills—deep, rich veins of commerce that could be tapped by anybody quick enough, industrious enough, and brave enough to stake a claim.
Though separated by the imposing bulwarks of geography, language, culture, politics, and history, the four BRICs were kindred spirits—all were populous, underdeveloped lands with governments eager to welcome investment from Western corporations. Or so it appeared to Jim O’Neill, the son of a postman from Manchester, England, who had risen to head global economic research at Goldman Sachs—and who had ingeniously lumped these four behemoths together in a November 2001 analyst report, titled “Global Economics Paper No. 66: Building Better Global Economic BRICs.” That modest 16-page client briefing would inevitably launch untold numbers of BRIC mutual funds and ETFs, indexes, investment conferences, and Wall Street research teams. It would force major companies to rethink their own marketing and manufacturing strategies, reroute supply lines, and send billions of corporate investment dollars into a constellation of once-little-known cities from Bangalore to Shenzhen.