International Business and Technology Blog

Many EU standards and policies that facilitate business and trade have been developed over the past years. However, the EU is yet to become a truly single market. Local small-medium sized companies face barriers when selling online, so do US exporters. Europe must embrace the digital revolution and open up digital opportunities for people and businesses. The European Commission believes that using the power of the EU's Digital Single Market will allow Europe to achieve this goal. This May, the European Commission introduced its detailed plans to create a Digital Single Market with the objective to combat its current online barriers in order to boost EU-wide cross-country e-commerce. This will help start-ups and small-medium sized companies to fully benefit from growth opportunities of the EU market. Subsequently, this will also allow US companies export more easily across the EU from a single central location. Country-specific regulation has been identified as the greatest barrier to a single, fully functional e-commerce market.  

Clients often ask us “What is a typical return on investment in country specific websites?” While the benefits of international online presence and online marketing are enormous, there is nothing like a “typical” return on investment. It all depends on how you define the return and what investment you make.

New York, NY hosted, for four days between the 20 to 24 April 2015, the 9th round of U.S. – EU Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) negotiations. Traditionally, this respectfully rotated between Brussels, Belgium and Washington DC. What next? Las Vegas, to compete with Mayweather and Pacquiao? Somehow the latter's $300M television rights alone makes the drawing power competition somewhat unequal. Despite, or even perhaps because of the venue change, the US and EU Chief Negotiators, Dan Mullaney and Ignacio Garcia Bercero led their respective negotiating teams fighting strategically, leveraging data and information harvested from previous rounds and covered much needed ground.

Watch out “Les Gafa” are about! So says the EU Commission. The French provided this useful acronym, which encompasses a lot more than those four leviathan companies, Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon. It is all about entrenched EU industries protecting their turf, tax revenues (who is collecting and who is not) and all this wrapped into privacy concerns, when helpful! It was a big month for Margrethe Vestager, the European Commissioner for Competition, as she unveiled long awaited accusations against Google.

“The web changes business models.” Every business person says so; it’s much discussed, but little understood, often not thought through and even less deliberately reacted to and implemented. Yet the web, the broadband driven internet, has radically disrupted business models and none more so than that of the traditional middle man, the so-called distributor (that includes agents, brokers, channel partners, intermediaries, merchants…) who stand between the source of a good/service and the end client. Let’s look at business models and then at how they get discombobulated by the web. Looking for an

Most people assume that B2C ecommerce is the “big brother” and B2B is trailing way behind, but it is time to think again. Research from Forrester shows that, in the US, B2B ecommerce is now twice the size of B2C ecommerce and predicts that B2B ecommerce sales in the US will reach $780 billion by the end of 2015. That represents 9.3% of all B2B sales!  

If you want to be visible in your target export market online, you need to optimize your website for local search engines, such as google.de in Germany or google.fr in France. You might laugh that we call this global search engine giant local, but that is indeed the truth. Over 90% of searches in most European countries come from local Googles that show different search results. Remember, you cannot simply translate a well performing US keyword to Spanish or Dutch and expect to see the same results. Search trends, including keywords popularity and difficulty to rank, vary among markets.

Susanna Hardy, our web-savvy Managing Director – EU, had a great month “webinaring”. Susanna prepared, presented (audio and visual) and fielded the follow-ups from two webinars. She worked closely with our clients the Maine International Trade Center (MITC), Maine’s leading source for international business assistance as well as the Food Export Association of the Midwest USA and Food Export USA Northeast, who both did a great job hosting and moderating. Our sincere thanks go to Wade Merritt (Vice President) and Hannah Webb (Trade Assistance Manager) from the MITC team and John Belmont (Communications Manager), Joe Yotti (Branded Program Manager) and Kathryn Navarro (International Marketing Program Assistant) from the Food Export Association of the Midwest USA and Food Export USA Northeast team. The webinars were well attended and a great success. Attendees were selected and invited on the basis of their interest in growing their exports and the webinars proved educational and informative. Lots of time was dedicated to interactive questions as participants asked a range of export, ecommerce related questions and receiving informed answers. For MITC the subject was: “Grow your exports and business in Europe: Using online and ecommerce opportunities", presented on Wednesday the 18^th of March and the next week on Tuesday the 24^th March with the Food Export Association of the Midwest USA and Food Export USA Northeast, were pleased to present the webinar: "Building Your Online Presence to Boost Exports: Europe as a Case Study".  

How many languages can you speak sufficiently well to communicate with your fellow humans? Today's hyper-connected world enjoys approximately 6,500 languages, shared amongst >7 Bn people spread across >169 countries. So how do you feel now? Belittled? I do. Language, and communication between differing languages, is an issue that humankind has faced for a wee while now. Now, where did all these languages come from?