Globalization is also being affected by new perspectives of corporate management. Today, there is an emphasis on resilience over margins. Corporations want staying power. More solid balance sheets, more conservative financing, and more liquidity are important—it is no longer just about optimizing capital and profit margins.
To add to the uncertainty, we are currently in a rocky period as a new balance between the U.S. and China evolves. Hong Kong is caught in the crossfire. Hong Kong has been trying to pass a security law for some time, and China wants to accelerate the process. But if China attempts to impose its own legal system directly on Hong Kong, it will destroy the city’s value as a global financial center. From a broader perspective, with the public health crisis, one hopes both the U.S. and China will walk back from further escalation of tariffs.
“Ultimately, it is all about intellectual property, the struggle for dominance of key technologies of the 21st century,” Thomson says. “China will create its own technology supply chain. That puts many global suppliers and people who globally source at risk, but it also creates opportunities—in semiconductors, for example, where China is seeking to create its own intellectual property. These changes will create both new risks and new opportunities.”