Overview
Our company, Matrix Capital, intends to pursue a controlled and focused expansion into global markets. This expansion is informed by the company’s relative success in the U.S. In essence, ours is an investment fund that makes use of a proprietary trading approach to identify market opportunities to make the relevant investment decisions. The company accepts funds from investors and invests the said funds in three key sectors, i.e. consumables, energy, and financial services. We intend to evaluate countries in tree key regions; i.e. Africa, the Middle East and South America. The countries include Qatar (Middle East), Kenya (Africa), and Brazil (South America).
In seeking to expand, the company has four key factors it will be taking into consideration to inform its location choices. These include; country gross domestic capital per capita, political stability, competitive situation, and the country tax regime.
Analysis: Decision Matrix
Country/Region
Rating Factor
GDP per capita
Political Stability
Competition
Taxation
Weight
40
30
10
20
Qatar (Middle East)
5
3
3
3
Kenya (Africa)
2
1
2
2
Brazil (South America)
3
2
2
3
Country/Region
Weighted Score
Total
Qatar (Middle East)
200
90
30
60
380
Kenya (Africa)
In that regard, therefore, the country/region of choice as far as the setting up of an investment management company is concerned will be Qatar.
Discussion
Country Gross Domestic Product Per Capita
GDP, in basic terms, is the best measurement of the economic performance of a country. Unlike GDP whose concern is the entire economy, GDP per capita concerns itself with the output of individual persons, i.e. the average amount of money made by an individual person. More precisely, GDP per capita, in the words of Watson, Domingo, Landman, Miller, Watson, and Hopkins (2006) “is a measure of the total value of all the final goods and services produced in a nation during a year divided by the population of the nation” (p. 60). In our case, this is important given that one of the areas our company invests in is the high-end consumables arena, whereby our target is people with significant recurring incomes. It should be noted that although a high GDP per capita does not necessarily translate to a high disposable income level, the former is routinely used as a gauge of living standards. Low disposable income levels would in essence spell doom for our consumables portfolio which, as per our investment model, accounts for approximately 50% of our…
