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Business Daily

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Business Daily: The Shift Away from Exports

27/11/2009

The Shift Away from Exports

BBC World Service - Business Daily, The Shift Away from Exports

The problems of exporters trying to switch tack, to attract their own domestic consumers.

Companies in China and India which mainly sent their goods abroad, are having to change products, marketing and branding to attract consumers in their own back-yards.

The Holy Grail for many exporting economies, including China and India, is selling more of the goods they produce to their own consumers rather than sending them overseas.  

This massive shift has come about because of the impact of the recession in Western countries, which choked off billions in export earnings. 

But it is not easy for individual companies to turn around on a sixpence. We hear from John Zhao, chief executive of Hony Capital, one of China's best-known private equity firms, and from Rahul Mehta, managing director of Creative Group, an Indian clothing company which used to focus mainly on exports. Long before the credit crisis began it started to change the balance of its production, to appeal to domestic markets.  

We also talk to Dr Sandy Pentland, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, author of 'Honest Signals: How They Shape Our World.'  

He reckons that all of us communicate, clearly but quite unconsciously, just through the way we move, fidget and speed up or slow down our talking. And he claims that a business can benefit massively from understanding this.

And the BBC's Duncan Bartlett muses on the power of the Michael Jackson brand, even beyond the grave.

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