A FEW months ago, news broke of a rather interesting development: A  little-known Brazilian investment firm, 3G Capital was teaming up with legendary American investor, Warren Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway to buy H.J. Heinz, the iconic ketchup make for $28 billion. The deal was dubbed as the largest acquisition in the global food industry.

Some analysts have noted that the deal, which follows in the footsteps of other mega deals such as the acquisition by China’s Lenovo of the personal computer business of IBM years ago, as being symptomatic of a resurgence of mergers and acquisitions.

While there might be some validity to this claim, American thought leader and one of the most formidable management consultants on the globe today, Ram Charan, sees these developments as part of a bigger, more formidable trend that has vast implications for the future of practically every business. He calls the phenomenon the “global tilt.”

The global tilt, according to Charan, refers to an irreversible shift in economic power from North to South – from the US, Europe and Japan in the Northern Hemisphere to China, India, Brazil, Indonesia, Malaysia, South Africa and other countries  mostly in the Southern hemisphere. It is to these countries that major industries are migrating. These are the countries with the population that can generate not only sizeable consumption, but in addition possess a work-force that can produce the same output for a fraction of what it would have cost in countries of the North. Little wonder therefore that the centre of gravity for jobs, wealth and market opportunities, is fast migrating southwards.

Indeed,relative to the South, GDP growth in the Northern Hemisphere is low. America’s growth rate is at two to three percent while Europe and Japan are growing at less than one percent. Conversely in the South, India’s growth rate is between five and six percent, Indonesia’s is about six percent, China’s is about seven percent and Nigeria’s is about eight percent.

Assumptions pertaining to the business managerial superiority in Northern hemisphere are to all intents and purposes, now obsolete. In an intricately networked world where information resides on everyone’s fingertips Charan submits that businesses inthe South have ready access to the capital and expertise they need to grow and scale up. Their leaders also have just as much knowledge, talent and drive as  their Northern counterparts. They may not be grabbing the headlines as fervently as the top American business leaders but they are unleashing their entrepreneurial prowess no less fervently. The Southern hemisphere for

instance, now boasts of world leading entrepreneurs of the likes of the Aliko Dangotes, the Koos Bekkers (founder of Naspers the largest media company in the Southern hemisphere), Sunil Mittal of Bharti Airtel the world’s fourth largest telecommunications company and many more.

While increasing fluidity of capital and the communications revolution as well as the sheer explosion of the middle class globally are contributing to this tilt, says Charan, the human factor is also a key and powerful driver. The structures which the aggressive emerging business leaders in the South are building are such as could possibly rival those created in the 19th century by the likes of Andrew Carnegie, Henry Ford and John D. Rockefeller. Their owners are regularly on the move sourcing readily available funding and the critical expertise which they need to grow and scale up.

Whereas there might be a possibility for business leaders in the North to try to portray their peers down South as people who owe their success to government patronage or low cost labour, Charam posits that such views may be mistaken. Many  successful leaders down South are not only hugely ambitious with grand plans to extend their businesses on a global scale but also combine this with immense  energy. In addition, they enjoy a good number of advantages over their Northern counterparts.

Many emergent business leaders from the Southern hemisphere grew up under extremely difficult conditions. GT Bank’s co-founder, Fola Adeola, for instance, regularly narrates the story of how Aliko Dangote  once sold his car in the 1980s when he fell on tough times. Dangote by then resided in a neighbouring flat in Surulere district  of Lagos. Sunil Mittal, says Charan, began his career as a salesman selling crankshafts to bicycle manufacturers. Because his customers tended to bully him with regard to pricing, forcing him to sell at prices they practically dictated, he learned to ride on the back of trucks and crowded trains in order to maintain his margins. This discipline of maintaining tight margins has never left Mittal, he says. It can be argued too, that Dangote’s triumph over tough circumstances may have helped to hone his business shrewdness.

Southern leaders are also energized by the huge changes they see taking place right before their own eyes in their own countries. In a little over ten years for instance, telephones have grown from practically nothing to well over 100 million lines in Nigeria. Such a pace of growth is unprecedented in this age in any Northern economy, but unleashes tremendous opportunity for Southern business leaders. While an American company may think that four percent revenue growth is acceptable, his Southern peer would probably set his sights more in the range of 20 percent revenue growth. The Chinese appliance firm, Haier, had by 2011 been ranked for three years in a row by Euromonitor International as the top appliance brand in the world. By operating with painstaking innovativeness,

Haier has engaged well-known and -entrenched Northern manufacturers on their own ground, succeeded and leveraged that success to resounding effect across the world. Haier’s boss has never been equivocal about the main objective of the typical Chinese company, namely export products and earn foreign exchange.

In the case of Haier, in exporting, it was critical that it also established a solid brand reputation.

As head of the Brazilian beer company, AmBev, Carlos Brittos was keen on aggressive growth and expansion. Beyond spreading its tentacles across Latin America, it merged with Interbrew of Belgium in 2004 to form InBev. The Brazilian leader ran the merged firm even though the European Interbrew was the bigger of the two merged firms.

By 2008, InBev purchased Anheuser-Busch to form Anheuser-Busch InBev, the world’s largest brewer.

The global tilt which in a nutshell is the seldom appreciated (especially by the Northern Hemisphere) but growing shift in business and economic power from North America and Europe as well as Japan to the rapidly emerging economies of the Southern hemisphere, including China, India, Brazil, as well as the Middle East and parts of Africa.

Mr.  BEMIGHO AWALA, a communications expert,  wrote from Lagos.