Globalization is something lots of people talk about at a high level, and its typically focused on manufacturing. I blogged about Zach Karabell's notion of Chimerica which is not a single "place" but rather a cross border supply and demand chain, where is a GE washing machine made for example? But the type of trading that's occuring now is, in addition to manufatcuring, at a much deeper, cultural level.
YUM brands owns a number of familiar chains - KFC, Pizza Hut and Taco Bell to name a few. Like most businesses these restaurants are not growing very fast in the US. However they are experiencing decades long, rapid international growth.
One of the main reasons is adapting the brands to local tastes
China is of course one of the leading areas of growth and the company officially changed the name of Kentucky Fried Chicken to KFC (and changed the look of the Colonel Sanders mascot) to make the brand more exportable.
KFC's China menu bears little resemblance to the US menu and features such items as Congee, fried Shrimp in noodles and fried Crab meat. How has this worked out for YUM and KFC? Pretty well, KFC is the number one quick service restaurant in the People's Republic of China with 3,200 restaurants compared to McDonald's 1,200, and the gap is widening. YUM looks to have 20,000 KFCs in China eventually. That is a lot of growth - in fact there is even a KFC on Tiananmen Square - but still room for more.
YUM reported third quarter today, the numbers are telling. They opened 138 new restaurants in China, on track for over 600 this year. International profit rose 3% (in China it was 7%), while US profits dropped 16%.
As to the implications to infosec I think there are several. First off, you may have noticed in your business that the US, Europe and the developed economies are low growth or no growth. That means your business is either going to have to cut costs and/or look to grow internationally and especially in emerging markets like Brazil, India, Indonesia, and China. In many respects this is a stress test for security architecture. Distributed systems and processing is not an optional feature but implicit to the business model. Security mechanisms must integrate in the same way brands adapt.
Security is not about standalone silos, its about integration.
This concludes a bottom up look at one company's experience in China, for a top down view - Bloomberg's editors write that China's Fall Not Its Rise is the Real Global Threat.
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