Global strategy: more customers but more competitors

McKinsey's classic article "Getting to Global" is now available for free (requires registration):

Economic integration, the force driving this expansion, will promote the formation of global markets in accounting, chemicals, food, health care, the mass media, pulp and paper, telecommunications, and many other industries. Indeed, more integration will take place in the next 30 years than occurred in the previous 10,000 or more.

Companies operating in these future global markets will have profit opportunities worth hundreds of billions of dollars. The annual pretax earnings of, for example, the global personal financial services (PFS) industry, now standing at some $300 billion, will double within a decade. At the same time, the world's PFS markets, until recently segmented by regulation and technological limitations, so that no single participant captures more than 3 percent, or $9 billion, of the global profit pool—will integrate and become accessible to all. Thus any company that can capture 10 percent of the global PFS market can look forward to annual profits of $60 billion.