Made in Austria

So I've been on assignment here in Vienna, Austria for three weeks now and one interesting note is that Austrian use a lot of Austrian products. From commodity products, such as envelopes and pencils to Red Bull beverages, I'm impressed with the use of locally made goods. It sounds strange, but coming from the US it's very foreign (pun intended) for me to use and see so many products products that are made locally.

In other news, I attended an interesting event this morning sponsored by the Economist Intelligence Unit, a division of Economist Magazine. The event was a discussion on the business outlook for Eastern Europe and Russia. While it was a very broad discussion on topics such as local politics, human resources and economics, the supply chain copyrighting occurred more often then I expected. Doing business in this region of the world comes with its own challenges, particularly around logistics and getting your raw materials into the country and your products out of the country. According to Dr. Daniel Thorniely, SVP, economist Intelligence Unit, in many cases this requires joint ventures and acquisitions to get around the customs issues. What he didn't discuss was outsourcing. Why not simply find a trusted partner to outsource the headache of customs and shipping? That would be less costly then a joint venture and certainly easier then acquiring the skills.