What will happen now?

What will happen now?

Crisis, Elections, Stock Exchange Market, Currency changes, it became harder to focus to do business. Global economy’s ups and downs are effecting everything. Especially the developing countries are having hard times due to these movements. Business environment is already struggling with different dynamcis, they confused what to do in such a turbulunce. Some of the companies keep their positions with wait&see strategy and some of the decide fastly and close their operations. It became very hard to predict the near future. In such a period where the opportunities are declining and competitions with unemployment are growing rapidly, doing a business is exponentially getting harder.

It is hard to guess what will happen. Predictions are for 1-2 months after. We started to see the big companies take fast decisions and move forward. Taking a position, waiting and keeping the breath for a long time become a success factor. So, what kind of changes necessary for planned strategies and business models? It is not easy to answer this questions. Within this chain reaction, declined investment and buying power in the business world will effect many sectors. Especially, feeling this chained effect will not take too much time where the countries that integrate their economy to the foreign countries instead of in the country.

Presently, freezing the investments and not creating new expenses except the mandatory ones are the result of those. It will not be a surprise if we see the small enterprises will be closed soon, on the other hand the companies who has cash and has a power of procurement will be able to resist. When we have a look to IT sector, investment cuts started to reduce the size of the market. And recovery period seems to take longer. The companies previously invested on outsourcing, need to revise their contracts for savings and they need to keep healthy their dependent companies. On the other hand, it is necessary to start for evaluating the technology tools about efficiency and consolidation. Now, the companies who has decided previously about those, they are more comfortable to move.

It is getting more important to focus on customer relationship management, sales and services programs, in order to continue to their operations within the changes of their internals and to move flexible in their operations. Now, selling is becoming inadequate for a company by knowing its customers, for a continuous cycle, its customer should gain and should make profit, because of this reason it is necessary to think one step ahead, and to change the strategy about selling.

It is very obvious that the companies in all sectors will change their business operations to create additional values for selling in the next days due to the decreasing profits. We will see decreasing revenues in product sales companies while increasing revenues in the services sales companies.

In these days where the efficiency gets more important, if an investment is necessary then it should be done as soon as possible; because it is seen that we will not see a more convenient time. In order to keep the breath longer, now it is time to revise the plans.

Mehmet Bilginsoy – December 2008