Impact of global crisis on Mexican multinationals varies by industry, survey finds

The Institute for Economic Research (IIEc) of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and the Vale Columbia Center on Sustainable International Investment (VCC), a joint initiative of the Columbia Law School and the Earth Institute at Columbia University in New York, are releasing the results of their second annual survey of Mexican multinationals today.1 The survey is part of a long-term study of the rapid global expansion of the multinational enterprises of emerging markets. The present report focuses on data for the year 2009. Highlights In 2009, the 20 companies listed in table 1 below posted about USD 117 billion in foreign assets, 63 billion in foreign sales, and had 227,484 employees in their overseas operations. The top three companies on the list are CEMEX, America Movil, and Carso Global Telecom, which together controlled USD 86 billion in foreign assets, which was 73% of the total on the list. The leading sectors on the list are food and beverages (4 firms), non-metallic minerals (4 firms), and telecommunications (2 firms). In keeping with the tradition in Mexican outward foreign direct investment (FDI), most of the investments were undertaken in Latin America and the Caribbean and in North America −specifically the United States-. These regions were followed in importance by Western Europe. Mexican outward FDI has now also begun to appear in China, India, and Australia. The shares of all companies ranked in table 1 are publicly traded, with the exception of PEMEX, which is 100% state-owned, and Xignux, which is a privately held family-owned firm

Striving to overcome the economic crisis: Progress and diversification of Mexican multinationals’ export of capital

The Institute for Economic Research (IIEc) of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and the Vale Columbia Center on Sustainable International Investment (VCC), a joint initiative of the Columbia Law School and the Earth Institute at Columbia University in New York, are releasing the results of their third survey of Mexican multinationals today. The survey is part of a long-term study of the rapid global expansion of multinational enterprises (MNEs) from emerging markets. The present report focuses on data for the year 2010. Highlights In 2010, the top 20 Mexican MNEs had foreign assets of USDD 123 billion (table 1 below), foreign sales of USDD 71 billion, and employed 255,340 people abroad (see annex table 1 in annex I). The top two firms, America Movil and CEMEX, together controlled USDD 85 billion in foreign assets, accounting for nearly 70% of the assets on the list. The top four firms (including FEMSA and Grupo Mexico) jointly held USDD 104 billion, which represents almost 85% of the list’s foreign assets. Leading industries in this ranking, by numbers of MNEs, are non-metallic minerals (four companies) and food and beverages (another four companies). All but two of the 20 are firms whose shares are traded on a stock exchange. The exceptions are PEMEX, Mexico’s fully state-owned oil and gas firm, and Xignux, a diversified family-owned enterprise. The top 20 MNEs had 223 foreign affiliates (branches, subsidiaries, et al). As with their counterparts elsewhere in Latin America, Mexican MNEs show a very strong regional orientation. As annex table 2 makes clear, the top 20 overwhelmingly prefer to invest in Latin America. The next region of choice, with a substantial presence of Mexican affiliates, is North America. Europe (mainly the European Union) is a somewhat distant third. The presence of Mexican MNEs in Asia seems to be growing, if slow. In 2008, four of them had affiliates in Asia; in 2010, seven did

Social influence analysis in microblogging platforms - a topic-sensitive based approach

The use of Social Media, particularly microblogging platforms such as Twitter, has proven to be an effective channel for promoting ideas to online audiences. In a world where information can bias public opinion it is essential to analyse the propagation and influence of information in large-scale networks. Recent research studying social media data to rank users by topical relevance have largely focused on the “retweet", “following" and “mention" relations. In this paper we propose the use of semantic profiles for deriving influential users based on the retweet subgraph of the Twitter graph. We introduce a variation of the PageRank algorithm for analysing users’ topical and entity influence based on the topical/entity relevance of a retweet relation. Experimental results show that our approach outperforms related algorithms including HITS, InDegree and Topic-Sensitive PageRank. We also introduce VisInfluence, a visualisation platform for presenting top influential users based on a topical query need

Grupos empresariales: expansión y poder

La característica más importante que diferencia la expansión actual de los grupos industriales con la de los años setenta, radica en que hoy lo hacen con recursos propios en vez de fincarla en recursos crediticios externos. Una segunda característica radica en la evidencia de una relación económica y política distinta para con el Estado y favorable hacia el gran capital privado. La tercera singularidad está en el tipo de expansión actual que tiende a rebasar los límites nacionales debido a las nuevas condiciones de reestructuración de la economía en su conjunto

Using social media to inform policy making: to whom are we listening?

Domination of social media is giving today’s web users a venue for expressing their views and sharing their experiences with others. With well over a billion active users, social networking sites (SNS) have become dynamic sources of information on peoples’ interests, needs and opinions and are considered an extremely rich source of content to reach out to many millions of people. This is creating a revolutionary opportunity for governments to learn about the citizens and to engage with them more effectively. The potential is there for eParticipation applications to go from simply informing the public to unprecedented levels of interaction and engagement between Policy Makers (PMs) and the community, involving the public in deliberation processes leading to legislation. Despite its great potential, several concerns arise from the exploitation of social media, especially when used to inform policy making. Among these issues we can highlight the lack of awareness of the characteristics of those citizens discussing policy topics in social media, and lack of awareness of the characteristics of their discussions. Although some studies have emerged in the last few years that aim to capture the demographics of social media users (e.g., gender, age, geographical locations) they tend not to focus on those specific users participating in policy discussions. Understanding who are the users discussing policy in social media and how policy topics are debated could help assessing how their views and opinions should be weighted and considered to inform policy making. Aiming to provide a step forward in this direction, this paper investigates the characteristics of over 8K users involved in policy discussions in Twitter. These discussions were collected by monitoring, for one week, 42 different political topics selected by sixteen PMs from different political institutions in Germany. Our results indicate that: (i) a high volume of conversations around policy topics does not come from citizens, but from news agencies and other organisations, (ii) the average user discussing policy topics in Twitter is more active, popular and engaged than the average Twitter user and, (iii) users engaged in social media conversations around policy topics tend to be geographically concentrated in constituencies with high population density. Regarding the analysed conversations, a small subset of topics is extensively discussed while the majority go relatively unnoticed

Es diferenciado el impacto de la crisis en las multinacionales mexicanas, según los resultados de una investigación internacional conjunta

El Instituto de Investigaciones Económicas (IIEc) de la Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) y el Vale Columbia Center on Sustainable International Investment (VCC), una iniciativa conjunta entre Columbia Law School y The Earth Institute, de la Universidad de Columbia en Nueva York, publican hoy los resultados de su segunda encuesta anual sobre las empresas multinacionales de México . La encuesta forma parte de un estudio de largo plazo acerca de la rápida expansión global de las empresas multinacionales de las economías emergentes. El presente informe se centra en los datos para el 2009. Aspectos destacados del informe Este año las 20 empresas del ranking listadas en el cuadro 1 suman USD 117 billones de activos foráneos, USD 63 billones de ventas foráneas y 227,484 empleados en el extranjero. Las tres empresas que encabezan la lista son CEMEX, América Móvil y Carso Global Telecom que controlan USD 86 billones de activos foráneos representando el 73% del total. Los sectores en los que se ubica el mayor número de empresas del ranking son: bebidas y alimentos (4 firmas), minerales no metálicos (4 firmas) y telecomunicaciones (2 firmas). Continuando con la tendencia tradicional de la inversión extranjera directa (IED) mexicana, la mayor parte de ésta fue realizada en Latinoamérica y el Caribe y en Norteamérica (específicamente en EU). Les sigue en importancia Europa Occidental y ha comenzado a aparecer en China, India y Australia. Las acciones de todas las empresas del ranking se negocian en la bolsa de valores con la excepción de PEMEX que es 100% de propiedad estatal y de Xignux

Primer ranking de multinacionales mexicanas encuentra una gran diversidad de industrias

El Instituto de Investigaciones Económicas (IIEc) de la Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) y el Centro Vale de Inversión Internacional Sustentable de la Universidad de Columbia (VCC), una iniciativa conjunta entre Columbia Law School y The Earth Institute, de la Universidad de Columbia en Nueva York, están publicando los resultados de su encuesta de las empresas multinacionales de México hoy en día.1 La encuesta es parte de un estudio de largo plazo acerca de la rápida expansión global de las Empresas Multinacionales (EMNs) de los mercados emergentes. El presente informe se centra en los datos para el 2008

Emerging Market Global Players 2017. The Uneven Trends of Mexican MNEs: Between sluggishness and strength in the international markets

The Institute for Economic Research (IIEc) of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and the Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment (CCSI), a joint center of Columbia Law School and the Earth Institute at Columbia University in New York, are releasing the results of their sixth survey of Mexican multinationals today.1 The survey, conducted during 2017, is part of a long-term study of the rapid global expansion of multinational enterprises (MNEs) from emerging markets.2 The present report focuses on data for year 2015