A Long-Term Strategy for Latin America

Latin American countries are developing at a healthy pace, and the major ones like Brazil and Argentina seem to have achieved a stability that is worthy of the trust of international finance institutions and the private investors despite recent shakeouts. The entire continent requires major investment in infrastructure ranging from roads to power plants to telecommunication to restoration projects to reverse the ravages of ill conceived investment and development strategies of the past. In order for the US engineering-consulting companies to take full advantage of the potential of this market, an integrated market and resource development strategy should be adopted. The strategies which may have worked in the past, where the foreign company obtained the contract with the help of an "agent", worked the project with minimal local help, using expatriates in the country supported by home office personnel will no longer work because of the increasing competitiveness of the market and emergence of sizable local companies with technical capability and political clout. A more effective strategy is to develop local manpower fully integrated with the core US staff, who is capable of developing and executing work. In order to successfully apply this strategy, a number of generic issues (each with its nuances changing from country to country) must be resolved. These issues are: language, culture, understanding of local politics, cost of training and development, cost of manpower, and legal liability. The strategies successfully applied by several companies to deal with these issues, are: Use of bilingual local staff, training them in parent company offices, thus fully integrating them into the parent company organization and subsequently basing them in their home country, selecting suitable Spanish or Portuguese speaking US employees and integrating them into the local organization, developing duplicate databases (key marketing materials and basic tools of trade) in Spanish and Portuguese to minimize dependence on translations, and developing local strategic alliances and the necessary diplomatic skills to deal with regional sensitivities and legal issues. This paper develops the issues and strategies, based on the experience of the author and selected reference material.