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NAVIGATING LATIN AMERICAN DISTRIBUTION CHANNELS

Developing a profitable go-to-market strategy in Latin America is no easy task given the multitude of consumer sales channels at work. In urban areas, the arrival of modern retailers in the form of global supermarket, hypermarket and club stores has shaken up traditional channels made up of owner-operated independent retailers built upon inefficient layers of intermediaries.

However, marketers would be mistaken to abandon independent and informal channels of retail that still represent more than three-quarters of Latin American retail for fast moving consumer goods. Instead, successful marketers must master multiple channels, even at the risk of cannibalizing their own sales in a single channel.
 

BRAZIL’S RECORD-BREAKING AUTOMOBILE DEMAND: CAN SUPPLY KEEP PACE?

After 10 painful years of meager growth, the automotive industry has revived and Brazil is once again registering record sales. Several auto makers are already working triple shifts and having employees work on weekends and will soon have to consider expanding capacity. The global auto parts players may be well-structured to make such changes, but the industry is also very dependent on hundreds of smaller local auto parts suppliers that will not be able to keep up with this rhythm without either private financing or government support.

WAL-MART: TO BOLDLY GO WHERE NO BANK HAS GONE BEFORE...

By leveraging its size and scale, Wal-Mart will be able to do in financial services what it does with retail items: undercut competitor pricing. The consensus is that Wal-Mart can easily afford to invest the time and money to educate the larger unbanked Latino community and can operate at a loss until the product is known and respected within the community. Big banks are well aware that the Latino community is quickly moving into the middle class within a generation of immigrating.