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  3. The New Business Models A) Most emerging countries are fond of highly diversified companies. India’s Tata Group, which acco

The New Business Models A) Most emerging countries are fond of highly diversified companies. India’s Tata Group, which acco

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问题     The New Business Models
    A)  Most emerging countries are fond of highly diversified companies. India’s Tata Group, which accounts for almost 6% of the country’s GDP, has subsidiaries in car making, agricultural chemicals, hotels, telecommunications and consulting. But such diversification is not confined to giant organizations. Many emerging countries also rely heavily on state-owned enterprises. They are neither the old nationalized companies run by the government and designed to control a large part of the national economy, nor the classic private-sector companies that sink or swim. Instead they are two-sided  creatures  that shift between sea and land, borrowing money from governments at subsidized rates one moment, plunging into the global market the next.
    B)  Hybrid (混合体) organizations are particularly prominent in the energy sector. The world’s 13 largest oil companies, as measured by reserves, are all controlled by governments, and three quarters of the world’s crude-oil reserves are in the hands of state-owned companies. Many of high-tech companies are also state-backed. But such organizations are active in lots of other areas, too. Like the developing world’s private giants, they are often diversified.
    C)  In their different ways both of these corporate forms are creative responses to their circumstances. Diversified companies can adapt to environments rife with political and financial risks. Tarun Khanna, of the Harvard Business School, argues that they are also good at dealing with shortages of vital resources such as capital and talent. The Tata Group can use capital from established businesses to support growth in new ones, and has the resources to attract and train the best people. It can also use its brand name to sell all sorts of products. Indians who have grown up enjoying Tata tea might be more inclined to buy the latest Tata electric car.
    D)  State-owned companies also draw on long traditions. Authoritarian governments can use them to direct economic activity (and also to preserve their economic power). Local entrepreneurs can use them to seize business opportunities. And even Western multinationals can use them to gain access to difficult markets.
    E)  How are these companies likely to fare as they compete in a global marketplace? Most Westerners have little time for diversified companies; they expect a "discount" when they buy such shares on the stock market, and regard them as a primitive corporate form that will tend to disappear as local stock markets improve and investors rather than companies get to do the diversifying. But the inefficiency of capital markets is only one of the reasons for diversification. Two of the others—talent shortages and brand-building—are likely to be around for a long time yet. Conglomerates (大型联合企业) may have an enduring advantage in attracting and training talent in rapidly growing markets, and in building brands in regions where brand recognition is low and potential consumers are numbered in their billions rather than millions.
    F)  The case for state-owned companies is not so good. Hybrid companies are inherently confused organizations; unclear whether they are responsible to the state or the marketplace, and beaten by contradictory pressures. They are subject to political meddling (干预), often called upon to save "strategic" jobs and regularly used to oil the state patronage machine. Outsiders often find it hard to know whether to treat them as a business or an arm of government. And the OECD says that state-owned enterprises have significantly lower levels of productivity than private firms.
    G)  It would be foolish for Western companies to dismiss these new corporate life forms as evolutionary dead ends, but there is little scope for emulating them. The same is not true of many of the business models that the emerging world has come up with. They are not only important innovations in their own right but have serious implications for the way that Western companies run their affairs.
    H)  Three of them are particularly powerful. The first concerns rethinking economies of scale, which usually involves scaling up. Companies reduce unit costs by centralizing their manufacturing and producing long runs of standardized items. But centralized production adds expensive layers of bureaucracy, and it is hard to make it work in emerging markets where populations are often widely scattered and distribution systems abysmal.
    I)  The Boston Consulting Group notes that a growing number of entrepreneurs in the emerging world are replacing scaling up with scaling out, which means involving a wider range of people in the process of production and distribution, something that has been made much easier by mobile phones and the Internet. The most successful examples of this are clinics on wheels, but there are plenty of others. Nutriset, a French manufacturer of fortified food for malnourished children, has outsourced production to local franchises in Africa. The company maintains quality control and the franchises are close enough to the children to make distribution quick and easy.
    J)  A second business model takes an equally opposite approach to production. John Hagel and John Seely Brown, who run Deloitte’s Centre for Edge Innovation, argue that Western companies have spent the past century perfecting "push" models of production that allocate resources to areas of expected demand. But in emerging markets, particularly those where the Chinese have a strong influence, a very different "pull" model often prevails, designed to help companies mobilize resources when the need arises.
    K)  These pull models fundamentally change the nature of companies. Instead of fixed armies looking for opportunities, firms become loose networks that are forever reconfiguring themselves in response to a rapidly shifting landscape. Such models are not peculiar to emerging markets; Dell builds computers to its Western customers’ specifications, and Western management gurus have been advocating networks for decades. But according to Messrs Hagel and Seely Brown they are far more widespread in emerging countries.
    L)  The developing world’s most innovative business model may be the application of mass-production techniques to sophisticated services. This started with India’s outsourcing firms, which demonstrated that economies of scale and scope could be reaped from services that used to be highly fragmented and geographically rooted. These outsourcers are still expanding and moving up market. Indian consultancies are now challenging Western ones in complex services, not just dealing with customer complaints.
    M)  Emerging-market entrepreneurs want these techniques beyond IT and the back office. For example, they see a huge market for legal services requiring a high level of expertise. Dr. Shetty is only one of many Indians who are applying Henry Ford’s principles to health care. LifeSpring has reduced the cost of giving birth in a private hospital to $ 40 by looking after many more mothers.

State-owned enterprises have lower productivity than private ones because they are confused about their roles.
选项
答案F
解析 由题干中的State-owned enterprises、productivity和their roles定位到F)段。细节归纳题。由定位段可知，国有企业的处境并不好，它们并不清楚到底是对国家负责还是对市场负责，而且还受到相互矛盾的压力。同时，它们屈于政府干涉，经常被要求保留“战略性的”工作岗位，而且要定期赞助国家这台机器。外人很难弄清它们是企业还是政府分支。由于这些原因，国企生产力与私企比相对较低。题干是对定位段的概括总结，故正确答案为F)。
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