WorldCity Business Magazine

The world in 1998, the world in 2005

by Ken Roberts

This issue celebrates the completion of our seventh year of publishing WorldCity.

In April of 1998, as we neared completion of our first issue, Miami had only recently learned that it would be the first temporary Secretariat for negotiations on something called the Free Trade Area of the Americas, a feather in the cap for the city and, I believed, a good omen for the publication I was launching.

Few people, of course, had ever heard of the FTAA or knew that the treaty was to be in place in January of 2005, and fewer still knew what the acronym stood for, but optimism ran high among the informed few.

In 1998, when the word “trade” was used in polite conversation, it referred not to imports and exports, but to the buying and selling of securities in the seemingly unstoppable stock market. The Dow was on it way to 10,000 for the first time ever, the NASDAQ was on it way to 5,000.

Oil prices were being discussed in those days, but not like today. When the topic was speculating on the price of a barrel of oil, the question was how low it would go, and it would sink into the low 20s. A gallon of gas didn’t cost much more than a dollar, the same price it had been for many, many years.

Trade as in international commerce had been climbing unabated for many years, and the annual question was how much it had risen over the previous year. That would soon change, too.

The Ocean Reform Act was yet to come, and the maritime industry still operated economically much like the ancient industry it was, with a cartel-like, rate-setting structure. Insiders still called them “steam ships,” though they no longer were.

No one yet knew the names of any of President Clinton’s interns.

Hugo Chavez was but the leader of a failed military coup, and a convicted one at that. Lula was still a leftist Labor leader, an outsider. Argentina was stable.

Wal-Mart still proudly proclaimed “Made in America” and no one talked much about China.

The biggest threat to our borders, or so it seemed, was Mexicans dreaming of a better future by sneaking into Texas, Arizona and California, and it was but an annoyance to those who cared. Few people knew much of anything about a lanky and bearded Saudi by the name of Osama bin Laden, and the threat to our borders that lay in waiting.

It was a different world in the first months of 1998 as we put that first issue to bed, a different world than the one in which we live as we put this one to bed.

Although WorldCity talked about China in that first issue, it was largely an aviation story and not one about the flood of imports that would come via ship. Not only could we not see the changes that were coming to the world and to South Florida, we really didn’t understand too much about the pieces of the international business community already in place. At it turned out, few in South Florida did. To my way of thinking, too few still do.

That is, in part, what this issue is all about. In Who’s Here: The Guide to South Florida’s Global Companies, a 27-page special report starting on page 33, we are divulging publicly far more information about the multinationals with a South Florida base than we ever have.

It is done in the quiet hope that it will continue a process begun in 1998 to change the way this community thinks about itself, to help it understand the enormous potential here, the tremendous impact decisions made here have on Latin America, the Caribbean and, as our cover story on GM’s Maureen Kempston Darkes illustrates, other parts of the world as well.

It turns out, we could only make room for half of the companies, so the remainder will appear in our May issue. And we couldn’t fit all the information we have gathered, only the most pertinent.

We still offer for sale the complete database on CD and in a custom-printed, 320-page book, but we wanted to provide as much information on these fascinating and diverse companies in this issue and the next as possible at no cost to you.

We think it is an important service, as this community continues to grow and mature, as it continues to mold its identity on the world stage.

With your help, with your guidance and prodding, we will work ever more diligently in our eighth year and beyond to advocate for a world made safer, richer, better and wiser through business links that know no boundaries.