Fisher Investments on Consumer Staples: Opportunity Knocks

In 2005, the developed world represented just 15 percent of the global population yet was a dominant 79 percent of the global economy. At the same time, EM represented 85 percent of the global population and a mere 21 percent of the global economy.* Fisher Investments believes the contrast likely won't last forever. As it fades, powerful growth opportunities will continually materialize in the undeveloped world. Fisher Investments believes emerging market countries are making gains on the developed world as more and more of their approximately five billion people join the burgeoning middle class.

Technology and communication advances over the last 20 years have made for an increasingly global landscape for corporations, enabling them to open manufacturing and distribution facilities around the world and spread business and intellectual capital to regions that previously lacked much of either. Fisher Investments believes the benefits include accelerated job creation, higher standards of living in many of the poorest parts of the world, and the creation of a massive new segment of consumers for multinational corporations (MNCs) to target. An astounding two billion people could join the global middle class by 2030. Should that occur, it would dwarf the nineteenth-century middle-class expansion that accompanied the Industrial Revolution.