Business Environment

When expanding in foreign markets, your company will face distinct and varying challenges. The particular mix of challenges you will be confronted with follow from the business environment your company operates in. This environment is defined by a range of factors, including a country’s long term (in)stability, the integrity of your business partners and the local security situation. Together, these factors form the ecosystem of your foreign projects or operations.

When solidifying your business continuity, it is important that you map and navigate these ecosystems. Because only if you understand how the ecosystem works, you can learn how to anticipate and overcome the risks to your operations. With our focus on intelligence and investigations, we are well-positioned to do so.

Our approach towards the business environment of countries focuses on three levels: strategic, tactical and operational.

You can rely on our strategic advice if you are preparing market entries and when expanding already-existing operations. With the top of our Business Environment pyramid, we help you answer crucial questions. For example:

• How might the long-term political stability of the region, country, province or city impact my operations?
• What is the prospect of civil unrest, and to what extent can this influence our business continuity?
• What economic strengths and weaknesses are significant to our project?

Our strategic advice is based on a research of the PESS-factors, which map Political, Economic, Socio-economic and Security developments.

Our support on a tactical level primarily serves two purposes:

• To detect integrity and compliance risks relating to your (prospected) business partners;
• To prevent reputational harm to your company.

In order to achieve this, we analyse the relevant stakeholders that your company partners with. This includes research into sanctions, legal rulings or other harmful proceedings such as corruption and fraud. Our main added value is that we do not only look into a single entity or individual but extend the risk assessment to related companies and persons. By doing this, we can reveal their personal and business networks.

Having upfront knowledge on the local business environment is of paramount importance if you are planning to operate a local supply chain or hire local staff. With our special focus on the security situation, we can identify risks on a local and detailed level. For example, regarding social unrest, the presence of militias or general crime levels in your area of operations.

Through our intelligence network and analysis of information, we are able to understand where incidents might happen and when, which will enable you to predict risks before they materialize. For example, based on our operational advice, you might decide to make changes to your supply chain or switch your operations to a different neighbourhood.