International Business and Technology Blog

Cecilia Malmström, European Commissioner for Trade, made the point clearly: “If the European Parliament (EP) or the Bundestag vote against the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) or the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA), don’t blame it on me. It’s the national governments that need to convince their people on the benefits>.” TTIP requires votes in favor by the EP and each of the 28 national parliaments. So once negotiations are complete, TTIP will face a mere 29 democratic hurdles. Across the EU, media (primarily social media) feeds us a regular anti-TTIP diet. Yet, the trade and investment benefits are so clearly self-evident to many of the Europeans who are responsible for such agreements, that they think that they are no longer obliged to repeatedly explain and justify TTIP. An insight into why is the background of over 1,400 such successful agreements negotiated by the EU over the past 50 years supporting European companies as they trade and invest internationally. And the result is, in case you were unaware, that the EU 28 is now the world’s biggest trader and investor and recipient of foreign investments.

Last week I spent four days attending the Paris Air Show, supporting Business Oregon and their three companies exhibiting, as well as Northeast Pennsylvania and their five companies attending the show. If you have not been, it is an enormous seven day event. This year there were 2,260 exhibitions from 47 countries. The USA had 320 exhibitors, 230-plus in the US International Pavilion where I was based. Around the show itself there were many side events, receptions and evening networking parties.

Online giant Google and a leader in seamless payment Ingenico teamed up to facilitate cross-border ecommerce. The project Export Accelerator aims to help online merchants boost their business abroad by reducing cross-border obstacles.

Export Accelerator will pilot in Belgium and will address a key challenge businesses face when expanding abroad. The solution should provide companies with an opportunity to explore and identify new growth opportunities, penetrate international markets and increase online revenue.

The European Citizens’ Initiative (ECI) is an alliance of >380 European organizations campaigning against TTIP and the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA), a free trade agreement between Canada and the EU. Members of ECI “believe that these two trade and investment agreements must be stopped because they pose a threat to democracy, the rule of law, the environment, health, public services as well as consumer and labour rights”. The basic ECI premise is that these agreements “increase the power of multinationals at the expense of democracy and the general good”. During the past month, there have been hundreds of anti-TTIP protests organized across Europe, none more so than in Germany.  

ibt partners is proud to have won the best Innovative Company 2015 Award, in the annual British Consul General Awards by the British American Business Council (BABC). On Friday the 29th May 2015, in Chicago, Illinois at the splendid British Consul General's Residence (with incredible views of Lake Michigan) during a lavish black tie evening reception, the winners were announced. 

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