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From the result of the informative and well attended event at Grant Thornton in London last night, the way to be “Doing successful business in Brazil” is to go to the Brazilian Chamber of Commerce events and listen to knowledgeable speakers like Martin Raven from Martin Raven Consultancy, Deborah Chobanian from Fortis Consultancy and Richard Britain from Clyde & Co. This event was the first put on by the combined efforts of the Brazilian Chamber, the IoD and CityUK, and judging by the large turnout this partnership worked well.
The speakers only had twenty minutes each, after being introduced by David Stringer-Lamarre of Fortis Consultancy. Martin led the field with his eloquent discourse on what Brazil was all about - Size, Scale and Sophistication ,he followed with the Challenges, Opportunities and Investment potential in Brazil. He laid the answer out in seven points for each of the areas. The challenges included a mixture of infrastructure, inflation, complicated Taxation and Legal System, lack of Skills, huge need for Education, the Language and some doubt on the Politics. The opportunities were about the World Cup in 2014 and Olympics in 2016, Food and agribusiness, increase in domestic consumption, bio-pharmo, automotive and Pre SALT oil. The reasons for Investment naturally covered many of the challenges and opportunities with the additions of market growth, natural resources, fresh water and the fact that Brazil was profitable.
Deborah was next and she concentrated on the culture centred on the fact that Brazil was about business by people with people. This involved four key areas around:
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building relationships and trust based partnerships
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understanding the many positive facets of flexibility
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always be very presentable for any meeting and do keep any PowerPoint presentation short and sharp
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finally remember the importance of hospitality and humour when building relationships.
Finally, Richard gave a three slide presentation of the legal situation, starting with dismissing the myth that doing business in Brazil was difficult but you did need to do your preparation first,decide on the legal structure you wanted right at the beginning and find a good partner. He then covered the many different legal options available from agency agreements through JV’s to the different corporate entities possible and finally described some of the other considerations like a very complicated tax system and be careful of the employment laws, which are heavily on favour of the employee.
The Q&A was good with some very solid knowledgeable answers to a variety of questions, including How accepting were Brazilians of people from other countries?.... What were the implications of the Bribery Act on doing business with Brazil?.. What was the situation with local content? … How good was governance in Brazil? … What was the best way of starting production in Brazil?
So if you are interested in doing business in Brazil, I suggest you keep a weather eye out for future events by looking at the websites of the Brazilian Chamber s website, the IoD and City UK. Very informative and many thanks to Grant Thornton for the wine and nibbles afterwards.
©William Barron
Creating insight
July 11th2011
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