Consumer growth and globalization

I was catching up on my Barron’s this week and a quote from Ajay Kapur of Citigroup caught my attention.  When discussing his macro investment themes Ajay said, "The world is driven by Asian exporters and U.S. consumers.  In the future, it will be Asian consumers and U.S. exporters."  Given that perspective, it is no surprise that VCs have been pouring dollars into consumer technology plays over the last 18 months in addition to investing in China and India to tap into their consumer bases in the future.  Many VCs seem to be down on the enterprise space.  Corporations are hoarding cash and are risk averse in terms of spending on new technology.  That being said, there are some major trends occurring like the move to a service-oriented architecture and automation and virtualization of the data center.  Given the amount of time VCs are spending on global and consumer investments, I believe it is the right time to continue investing in enterprise start-ups developing product 12-24 months ahead.  As for the consumer globalization trend, I have been quite happy with my investment in the the Vanguard Emerging Markets Stock Index fund (VEIEX) which has been up 19.75% YTD.

Published by Ed Sim

founder boldstart ventures, over 20 years experience seeding and leading first rounds in enterprise startups, @boldstartvc, googlization of IT, SaaS 3.0, security, smart data; cherish family time + enjoy lacrosse + hockey

One comment on “Consumer growth and globalization”

  1. I buy the Asian consumer part, but remind me again what we’ll be exporting here in the US besides jobs? 🙂

    Perhaps its entertainment content? We used to make cars, but now we make celebrities… like Paris Hilton. We definately have a cost advantage there. No other country can make celebrities cheaper than we can.

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