Category Archives: Business globalization

The Top 25 Global Web Sites of 2011

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I’m pleased to announce the publication of the 2011 Web Globalization Report Card. This year, we reviewed 250 web sites across 25 industries. The web sites represent nearly half of the Fortune 100 and nearly all of the Interbrand Global 100.

Out of these 250 sites, here are the top 25 overall:

Google, which has held the number one spot for years, was unseated by Facebook this year. Facebook’s recent innovations (multilingual social plugins, improved global gateway, multilingual user profiles) gave it the edge. (I’ve devoted a separate report to Facebook’s innovations.)

Companies like 3M, Cisco, Philips, and NIVEA have become regular faces in the top 25. But there are some new faces as well. There are five companies new this year to the top 25: Volkswagen, Adobe, Shell, Skype, and DHL.

Although these 25 web sites represent a wide range of industries, they all share a high degree of global consistency and impressive support for languages. They average 58 languages — which is more than twice the average for all 250 sites reviewed.

The average number of languages supported by  all 250 web sites is 23, up from 22 last year. As the visual below illustrates, language growth over the years has been amazing. Seven years ago, I was thrilled to find a web site with more than 20 languages. Today, 20 languages is below average.

Language is just one element of web globalization, but it is the most visible element. When a company adds a language, it is making its global expansion plans known. If you want to know where your competitors are betting on growth, spend some time looking at their local web sites. More than twenty companies added four or more languages over the past 12 months.

Fast-growing languages on the Internet include Hungarian, Turkish, Indonesian, and Russian. Here is where Russian stands today — now found on nearly 8 of 10 web sites:

In the Report Card, languages account for 25% of a web site’s score. We also evaluate a web site’s depth and breadth of local content, the effectiveness of the global gateway, and overall global consistency. Beginning in 2010, we have also begun tracking how companies promote local social platforms such as Facebook and Twitter around the world. Our goal was not only to highlight the leaders in language but to identify those web sites and services that were globally “well rounded” as well as innovative.

The top 25 web sites are not perfect. The Report Card details many ways these sites could be improved (including Facebook and Google). That said, the executives who manage these web sites and services deserve a great deal of credit. As someone who has worked as both a consultant and an employee at companies such as these, I know how challenging it can be to get the funding to add languages and staff and to educate various teams on the many complexities of web globalization. While it may be the company names that appear on the top 25 list, it is the hundreds of passionate and bright people who got them there.

Congratulations!

The next Internet revolution will not be in English

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This visual depicts about half of the currently approved internationalized domain names (IDNs), positioned over their respective regions.

Notice the wide range of scripts over India and the wide range of Arabic domains. I left off the Latin country code equivalents (in, cn, th, sa, etc.) to illustrate what the Internet is going to look like (at a very high level) in the years ahead.

This next revolution is a linguistically local revolution. In terms of local content, it is already happening. Right now, more than half of the content on the Internet is not in English. Ten years from now, the percentage of English content could easily drop below 25%.

But there are a few technical obstacles that have so far made the Internet not as user friendly as it should be for people in the regions highlighted above. They’ve been forced to enter Latin-based URLs to get to where they want to go. Their email addresses are also Latin-based. This will all change over the next two decades.

For those of us who are fluent only in Latin-based languages, this next wave of growth is going to be interesting, if not a bit challenging. In a Latin-based URL environment, you can still easily navigate to and around non-Latin web sites and brands. For example, if I want to find Baidu in China, I can enter www.baidu.cn. For Yandex in Russia, it’s yandex.ru.

But flash forward a few years and these Latin URLs (though they’ll still exist) may no longer function as the front doors into these markets.

Try Яндекс.рф. It currently redirects to Yandex.ru.

In a few years, I doubt this redirection will exist.

We’re getting close to a linguistically local Internet — from URL to email address. There are still significant technical obstacles to overcome. It will be exciting to see which companies take the lead in overcoming them — as these companies will be well positioned to be leaders in these emerging markets.

UPDATE: I’ve expanded on this topic in a recent article on IP Watch.

The decline of foreign markets and the rise of local markets

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An article in The Wall Street Journal talks about the American “two track” economy — in which US companies that sell globally are doing much better than those focused only domestically.

One quote jumped out at me:

But John Farrell, global head of strategic planning, says Coke approaches the world not as an American company that does a lot of business abroad, but as a global company that numbers the U.S. among its hundreds of markets.

I’ve been saying something similar to since for many years. In 2005, I wrote:  Smart and aggressive companies will transform themselves from US companies serving foreign markets to global companies serving local markets.

Every market is now a local market.

The only question is whether (or when) your company will go after it.

The Wall Street Journal article, because it relied on publicly traded corporate data for its analysis, may create the impression that only only large companies can benefit from these global opportunities.

But I find the most exciting global success stories among smaller, privately owned companies. This is a golden moment in history for small businesses to start expanding into new markets. Internet growth in emerging markets is booming. And I’m not even recommending you dive into China, a market that is extremely difficult to succeed in. Take a look at Brazil, Chile, Turkey, Poland, Ukraine, Indonesia. If you’re a smaller company, look at a smaller market that may be overlooked by your larger competitors.

I’ll leave you with this excerpt from the article:

… economists expect economic growth of 9.8% this year in China, 8.3% in India and 7.5% in Brazil.

All that  growth is encouraging more American companies to venture abroad. Pizza-chain operator Papa John’s International Inc. currently gets only about 4% of its revenue from its foreign operations, but in recent years the Louisville, Ky., company has been making infrastructure and supply-chain investments that it says will help it expand in foreign markets.

“We believe international is going to be more of a part of our growth,” says Papa John’s Chief Financial Officer David Flanery, adding that within two or three years he expects the company will be opening more new restaurants outside the U.S. than inside it.

And if you’re curious about what companies have done the best job localizing their web sites for markets around the world, check out the Web Globalization Report Card.

Philips CEO on expanding globally

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Last week I said I’d love to see more profiles of global-minded business execs and, sure enough, the Journal delivers.

Here’s an interview with the Philips Electronics CEO Gerard Kleisterlee.

According to the article, the company’s emerging-market sales increased 29% in the second quarter from a year earlier and now make up 34% of the company’s total sales. And it’s just getting started.

Some choice quotes from the interview:

The rush to emerging markets is there already for the last 10 years. What you have started to see is that, in many of these emerging markets, now you get growing local [Chinese] competitors who become either regional or aspiring global competitors.

It does not suffice to serve only the metropolitan areas. In India and in China you need to have good rural distribution.

For the emerging markets we have even more local responsibility. In general we try to push responsibility down in the organization and have everything necessary centralized. But for emerging markets we have done that even more than for the developed markets.

The Philips global web site finished in 4th place overall in the 2010 Web Globalization Report Card. Decentralization of control is a key ingredient of successful local web sites, particularly in emerging markets.