To watch TV, read an email on your phone or download a video to your computer, you likely use satellite services. But most people don’t know how satellites work, how the satellite business operates or how explosive growth in demand for bandwidth may affect what we pay for communications. Carmen Gonzalez-Sanfeliu, vice president for Latin America and the Caribbean for Intelsat, demystified all that at WorldCity’s CEO Club on March 5, prompting a lively discussion into how modern communications is revolutionizing everything, from banking to real estate to even management.… Read More
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VISA's Salvador Perez-Galindo led the discussion
In a transparent economy, foes at every corner
Heightened transparency in the internet-driven and increasingly globalized economy is not always good news in Latin America and around the world, according to participants in WorldCity’s most recent Goverment Affairs Connections event.
While increased trade and other business across borders has benefitted multinationals and hundreds of thousands of other companies as well as many people in the developing world, it tends to keep the government affairs and public policy officials at multinationals on their toes.
“What is happening now is a lot more scrutiny,” said Salvador Perez-Galindo, who became VISA Latin America’s first head of government affairs when he was hired four years ago.
VISA, a public company, has about 1.7 billion cards issued worldwide with $4.3 billion in payment value.
Perez-Galindo led the discussion at the Government Affairs Connections gathering, held at the Hyatt Regency in Coral Gables and sponsored by Chevron and the international law firm Fowler Rodriguez Valdes Fauli. Held six times per year, the event series is one of six distinct series hosted by WorldCity. Others are held for chief marketing officers, the “CEOs” or top officials working with multinationals in South Florida and head of human resources.
With regard to government affairs officials, heightened transparency also requires relinquishing more data. As FedEx’s Manuel Perez said, the information required in manifests is “who from, who to — the whole nine yards.”
Discovery Networks sees “more protectionism, more regulation,” according to Gustavo Lopez, vice president for Legal for Latin America and U.S. Hispanic for the media company. In order to head off too much government control of its content as well as other broadcasters, the trade groups Television Association of Programmers said, “Let’s create a pan-regional rating system,” Lopez said. “Even that has been difficult. We wanted to translate the U.S. system” but found that difficult.
In addition to the amount of information available to people, governments and companies, the speed with which the information moves continues to accelerate.
“Years ago,” said Burson Marstellers’ managing director for Public Affairs, Ramiro Prudencio, “you could say , ‘That’s not going to hit Latin America for five, 10 years.’ Now, it’s five months, or five weeks.”
Copy-and-paste protest movements driven by emails, blogs, Facebook, Twitter and websites makes keeping up a critical component.
While wining, dining and cajoling government officials might have worked well in the past, increasingly there is a need to form coalitions, work with trade groups, work with chambers of commerce and create what Prudencio called “coalitions through value chain.”
A number of years ago, in the case of Chilean salmon importers, who were facing U.S. government restrictions to protect fish farmers in Maine, Burson-Marsteller took the approach that the “victims” of government regulation were not just the Chileans but everyone from the U.S. airlines flying the salmon into the country, the truckers driving the fresh-frozen fish to the distributors, the restaurants and the consumers.
“It turns out 63 cents of every dollar spent on Chilean salmon,” he said, “was added in the U.S. in some way. “You had Delta, American, United. You had airports, you had distributors, you had restaurants. The argument was that this was not ‘Chilean’ salmon.”
HP’s Eduardo Santos concurred. “ ‘Buy local,’ by definition, it’s good for the country. What we have to do is say, ‘What are we going to do about the port personnel (and others in the supply chain). We try to point out the after-effects.”
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