Continuous evolution and adapting to one’s environment is key to survival. This was first stated by Darwin in the context of life form on Earth. However, the essence of its meaning can very well be applied to businesses and corporations. Great many American corporations that failed to adapt with changing business environment have perished. IBM is one company that seems to understand Darwinism. I believe IBM is a one of success stories of business transformation.
IBM was the company that invented and helped develop many of the electronics and semiconductor industry’s significant technologies. It had been one of the early adopter of the concept of using electronics in actual products for ease of computing. Examples are personal computers, DRAM memories, hard disk drives, and numerous other component hardware technologies. It flourished with those electronic products. However, today’s IBM gets less than 20% of its revenue (which is continuously decreasing) from hardware products. continue reading rest of the article….
Almost all do-it-yourself investors who are reading about emerging markets would be aware of BRIC acronym. BRIC stands for Brazil, Russia, India, and China. This BRIC label clubs four distinct emerging markets into a single entity. Based on this labeling, there are many different mutual funds, closed-end funds, and ETFs. What is ironical is there is no similarity except that they are supposed to be the new growing economies. Each of these countries have different governance structure, different governance policies, different types of economies, different strengths, different financial markets, different values, etc., Even with these differences they are clubbed together and viewed as single entity for investing in emerging markets. This is again one of the follies of Wall Street investment firms (think GS!). To top it off GS and other investment firms seems to have more lenient bent towards China’s market among the BRICs. Is this because these firms get more business in China? I am not sure if there is an open answer to this one. But clubbing all these countries under BRIC acronym does not make sense to me. 
Tata Motors is an Indian Car Manufacturer who recently came out with Nano Car that cost less than $2500. A lot has been written about its design innovation, supply chain, and its execution. 
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Proxy Vechiles for Investing in Emerging Markets
On many occasions I have mentioned that emerging markets of India and China will be driven for growth in global economics. For US based dividend investors, there is really a lack of good quality dividend-based investing vehicle(s), and couple that with lack of maturity in financial markets, and we feel we are out of options.
TIP Guy at TIPBlog.in presented his thoughts on how dividends are perceived at least in India’s corporate world. I am reproducing certain snippets (with author’s permission).
continue reading rest of the article….