Latin America Rising

I have been interested in Latin America for more than 15 years, although my involvement with business in the region started only in 2007, when I visited Buenos Aires for a client engagement. Since then, I have closely followed the ever-growing reach of MercadoLibre, Latin America’s e-commerce leader, in the form of an interview with founder Marcos Galperin and regular Tech Stocks coverage.

More recently, I have profiled three interesting companies: Globant (headquartered in Buenos Aires), Ci&T (Brazilian roots), and Sonico (also Buenos Aires). While Globant and Ci&T are outsourcing companies, Sonico is a social media company with 50 million users.

I have also spoken with Ankur Prakash, the COO of TCS Latin America, a company that at present employs 6,500 people in Latin America and plans to get up to 25,000 by 2015.

What I see in Latin America today is reminiscent of what India has experienced over the past 20 years or so. Having started with outsourcing, India is now making a transition into other areas, including technology product companies, exciting Internet companies, mobile value-added services, and so on.

In Latin America, both the outsourcing industry and the homegrown software product and Internet industries are developing side by side. Outsourcing creates large-scale skill bases. Product and Internet companies create powerful, highly leveraged value. Both categories create wealth and jobs, and both have a large-scale economic impact.

Interesting parallels, don’t you think?

There is one other area I’d like to draw readers’ attention to. Chile, as part of its attempt to become a developed country as rapidly as possible, is experimenting with an interesting model of offering $40,000 worth of seed financing to startups. You can read more here on our Business Incubator series.