Every businessperson has repeatedly heard myriad reports and newscasts about the huge market opportunity in Asia. But western business managers will be caught flat‐footed if they do not update their notions of the new competitive capabilities of Asian companies and the rate at which they are evolving.
Nine conventional notions are presented in this article that are critical for business leaders to change.
Western businesses must reassess the strengths and weaknesses and update their competitive posture. First they need to jettison outdated conventional wisdom.
Western companies need to start including Asian players and industry clusters in their competitor screening process, if they have not already. They must evaluate how these rivals could encroach on their businesses and develop strategies now to preempt them.
To compete, western companies are learning new capabilities to develop products around consumer preferences and to engineer a cost structure to deliver them profitably at local price points.
