November 26, 2007
Goodbye Emea, hello Mena
A final thought (for now) following my visit to the Gulf. Are we witnessing the beginning of the end of that strange and unconvincing region, Emea?
Emea stands for Europe, Middle East and Africa. It was popularised by US companies, which tended until recently to lump everything in the time zone around London and Paris together for the sake of geographical and managerial convenience.
Thus, a glance at Google discloses that AT&T, Microsoft and others still count Norway, Saudi Arabia and Zimbabwe as part of the same place.
This makes bureaucratic sense, in an Orwellian kind of way. I don’t mean totalitarianism but the fact that the world in 1984 was divided into Oceania, Eastasia and Eurania. Emea similarly allows multinational corporations to categorise the world into the Americas, Asia and that bit in between.
But Emea was never coherent as anything other than an assembly of contiguous time zones. For a long time, to many companies, it essentially meant western Europe plus some other bitty countries of not much economic significance which happened to be within flying distance.
Now, however, things are changing. The emergence of Eastern Europe as an important market is pulling Emea apart from one direction. The other huge change is the rapid economic growth of the Gulf states, which are attracting lots of attention from businesses and professionals, as discussed below.
I noticed at the conferences I attended in Dubai that business people were suddenly sporting titles that suggested a Gulf breakaway movement. Unthinkably, only a few years ago, the hottest new region for financial go-getters appears to be the the Middle East and North Africa (or Mena, as it is known).
Henry Azzam, for example, is Deutsche Bank’s chief executive officer for Middle East and Northern Africa while Bertrand Valet is head of Morgan Stanley’s financial institutions and financial sponsors group for the Middle East and North Africa.
I don’t suppose that anyone will lament the passing of Emea. It is hard enough to get Europeans to regard their continent as a cohesive region, as the European Union has found. Throwing the Middle East and Africa into the mix only makes things worse.
In fact, I think it is cheering that one bit of Emea that few of the honchos at global headquarters even used to notice - North Africa - is the rising star of the multinational business world.
I agree EMEA is overdue for disaggregation, but if MENA takes off as a concept don’t forget those of us in SSA (sub-Saharan Africa).
Posted by: Jonathan Berman | November 27th, 2007 at 5:35 am | Report this commentAs someone who lived in Italy for two years and has since worked extensively across Europe, I’d say that the reason that “it is hard enough to get Europeans to regard their continent as a coherent region” is that it is no such thing.
Whether it’s EMEA, MENA, SSA, W Europe, or “Camel countries” (my favourite one recently), categories are necessary to give some shape to an organisation and define accountabilities. When, however, as often happens, they start to condition thought and make people think that a whole region thinks the same and wants the same thing, then they are a recipe for disaster.
Posted by: Alastair Dryburgh | November 27th, 2007 at 10:14 am | Report this comment