When people speak about Latin American markets, we know they tend to think of Brazil first. Of course, Brazil has opened the door to trading activity in the region and has been developing at a tremendous pace over the past few years, so that’s a natural response. However, as the region continues to boom, investors have been looking around, seeing many more opportunities across Latin America. Beyond Brazil, eyes are on Mexico, Chile, Colombia, Peru and Argentina – Latin American countries with surging economies that I believe will become much more mainstream within a few years.
I spoke about this very topic with TabbFORUM editor Greg Crawford recently. Greg asked me about where we are seeing opportunities in LatAm for our customers and how they can approach gaining access to these markets.
Watch the video interview above to take a deeper look at Latin America, beyond Brazil. Have a question? Please leave me a comment below.
While you’re here…
- See how the SunGard Global Network plays a key role in addressing connectivity challenges.
- Read my recent commentary on emerging markets around the globe.
- See more of why Latin America is “more than Brazil.”
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Thanks so much for sharing this and giving a shout out to Chile.
I am from Washington, DC but am currently based in Chile where I co-founded a company with Chilean Carlos Leiva. We are working to bridge the gap between Latin American and English speaking startups. Note: I do not come from the investment space…but here are my very basic observations…here in Chile.
I have a couple of questions and comments for you.
1. Potential Hurdle: Language differences, in Chile only 3% of the population speaks English fluently.
2. Potential Hurdle: Specialized and skilled talent: In Chile the government only invests 0.2% of GDP in human capital training
3. Potential Hurdle: Developers (or lack thereof), there are only about 91k here and many of them are working full time on projects
And now my questions, you might have heard about Arnon Kohavi, an Israelian investor who came to Chile and he left after 6 months, citing Chile’s closed networks because of a few families who ‘own everything’ and part with there being no real ‘VC’ network and a few other things. But many things here in LatAm and for many years has alot of industry that was state controlled. And case in point, their largest economic development agency is CORFO a quasi public-private sector entity, still very much public sector influenced….of course this plays a huge role if you want to start a business if you have to wait 30 days for the XYZ company to come and put in your telephone line and what have you (not saying that it is that extreme in Chile) but you get the point. Or on the other hand, say that I have an idea and want to do something in the telecom space but I have to go to the company to get access to the grid and he does not see the greater vision and thus I am a threat so he basically wants to do make everything some darn cost prohibitive that nothing ever gets innovated or advanced in the space. Entiendeme?
Second, in Chile the VC market is fairly underdeveloped, I think part because the ‘startup and tech entrepreneur’ sectors are underdeveloped in relative terms. There is talent here, great ideas and so forth but there are a lot of dots that don’t connect (as of now) from how, where and who can enter the entrepreneur and startup ecosystem to how those people get supported through that process. And the incubators….yeah….well….that is another story for another day.
At any rate in the investment space, a few people control the access to funding for this and tend to invest extremely conservatively in things they are very familiar with….mining, agriculture, wines…etc. Outside investors obviously like to invest in companies close to their home base (so we have a chicken and egg situation here). Entrepreneurs don’t have funding and resources to expand outside of Chile and investors generally don’t know they exist.
Then we have CORFO who wants businesses to start and grow in Chile. So Private Equity firms who may come here looking for some interesting projects here don’t have a presence here because I think in Chile (again this is my observation only) they don’t want their high growth potential and high impact companies to be sold. I think they want them to stay here owned by people based here and create jobs, research, close the patent gap with Asia and obviously generate ‘income’ for the government.
So I said all of that to say this
Where do you think is the ‘space’ and greatest opportunity for potential investors coming into the LatAm market and how do you think we go about connecting with them?
Thanks so much for your time and reading my long winded comment. Hope it makes sense.
cheers.