IBM’s growth market unit, which includes 152 emerging countries under China’s leadership, is expected to represent 30% of the company’s revenues by 2015, an increase of 5 percentage points from IBM’s initial prediction of 25%. “Brazil is No. 2, behind China, in terms of revenues,” said Ricardo Pelegrini, IBM Brazil CEO, during a news conference.
The unit was created in 2008, when IBM (NYSE: IBM) changed its corporate structure to be no longer divided by geographic region, but in growth and mature markets. Through this new model IBM could understand and address the specifics needs of emerging countries, where traditionally IT grows more than twice as quickly as those countries’ gross domestic product.
Currently, growth markets call for half of IBM’s employees.
As IBM celebrates its 100th anniversary, it addressed its growth strategy, based in four key areas: geographic expansion, innovation (comprising a so-called smart-planet strategy), cloud computing, and business analytics and optimization. “These are the big themes for us,” said Pelegrini, who pointed to the data explosion to explain how predictive analysis can help organizations around the globe. “It is very important for a company to advance to the facts before they occur.”
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In Brazil, IBM has increased its number of offices from 16 in 2007 to 36 this year, reaching cities that are growing, mostly in rural areas. IBM is also creating a delivery center of cloud computing in the country and installed in Brazil its ninth lab, which is dedicated to integrating knowledge from IBM’s scientists, mathematicians, researchers and service specialists around the globe. The Brazilian lab is expected to comprise about 100 people by 2013. Today IBM has 23 scientists in Brazil and 3,000 around the globe.
Last year, IBM Brazil has exports of U.S. $600 million, up 20% compared with 2009 and a quarter of the Brazil’s total IT exports of U.S. $2.4 billion.
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