WorldCity Business Magazine

President's Note

by Ken Roberts

A great deal of what we do at WorldCity is find and follow the multinational companies that have a presence in South Florida. On the pages of this magazine, we examine the best practices of these companies, the strategies of the executives that lead them, the corporations’ growth plans and how they affect the greater Miami area.

Now we’re poised to look at yet another facet of the multinational landscape. Money.

If you lead one of the nearly 1,300 multinationals WorldCity has identified during ongoing research for our Who’s Here directory, we will be asking you a relatively simple question: How much of your company’s revenue is under your direct supervision?

Want to venture a guess? To give you a sense of what the number could be, think of the answer for your company. If the average ends up being just $25 million, which is no small potatoes, the total for South Florida would be $32.5 billion. If you oversee revenues of $50 million and your company is representative, the total is $65 billion.

We expect that the finally tally is far greater thanks to some of the larger multinationals here and their impact throughout not just the region, but the world. Think AIG, Caterpillar, Telefnica and Global Crossing, IBM and Microsoft, Citigroup, UPS and Ryder, Discovery, MasterCard and Visa, InterContinental and Hyatt.

To further assist in your guessing game, we know that from 3 percent to 5 percent of the larger multinationals’ business comes from Latin America. We also know that there are about four times as many employees managed from here as there are employees who work here.

In our quest for that total revenue number, WorldCity is teaming with the business school at Florida International University, which has been a long-time partner on our event series, DHL Connections. We are delighted to be working with FIU professors Jerry Haar and Sumit Kundu. Once the study is complete, we’ll host an event inviting all the companies that participated in our research to discuss the findings. The results will be featured in an article in WorldCity.

If you’re still working on your estimate, it might help to take a look at the story and list that begins on page 32. This is the second half of selected information from our Who’s Here multinational directory. The first half was spotlighted in our January issue.

The list does more than identify the multinational business community in South Florida. It also provides the foundation for the business stories that unfold on the pages of WorldCity and in our three event series: DHL Connections, TransWorld TradeLinks and the CEO Roundtable.

Such a success stories is that of multibillion-dollar cell phone distributor Brightstar which, under the direction of CEO Marcelo Claure, seems to get bigger and better at every turn (see “Brightstar’s Big Ambitions, page 22). But it’s just one of many, exceptional stories from the local company outfitting the world’s tallest hotel to a company that’s barely known by the general public in Miami but is an everyday word for technology buffs knowledgeable about gaming computers.

We’re excited about our new survey in conjunction with FIU. However, I cannot write about it without a tip of the hat to Baird Lobree, the founder and president of consulting firm Auxis. He and I have been discussing this idea for years.

Finally, Baird, it’s on the front burner.