This week we will travel to Colombia to attend the largest business event in that wonderful country: the 55th Macrorrueda organised by Procolombia.
Procolombia is the Colombian state agency responsible for internationalisation promotion; their services portfolio includes support for foreign investors.
This will be the second Macrorrueda event that we attend. The first was an impressive business showcase with a great potential for quality contacts. Colombia is an underrated market with great opportunities, and one of the countries where we work more intensely.
Fortune magazine has just counted Colombia among the seven most interesting markets in the world. They point that the BRIC countries are already mature markets: that’s why companies need to start looking beyond BRICs and consider investing in other markets, like the frontier markets. Colombia, in particular, shows great promise:
- Peace: success in the peace process could add up to 2 points to the growth rate, and notably improve competitiveness.
- Infrastructure: the Fourth Generation Concessions scheme to improve transport infrastructure has a 23 billion USD budget for the period 2015-2020, to be implemented through Public-Private Partnerships.
- Macroeconomy: the country is in the middle of an unprecedented time of prosperity, with an average growth of 4.5% since 2010 and growth expectations over 5% for the upcoming years.
But our global view must be realistic. If the country does not overcome some structural problems, it will not be able to jump to the next development stage.
