Global Business and Spending Monitor 2012 – The New Era of Value Discipline

The senior finance executives who participated in the 2012 Global Business and Spending Monitor expect economic growth to moderate in the year ahead. As a result, the pool of resources available to support company growth is not likely to increase substantially at many companies. Meanwhile, companies around the world continue to contend with a wide range of threats to their growth, including persistent uncertainty, increased regulatory pressure, rising inflation, and currency-market volatility.

CFOs are responding to such challenges by adopting a mindset of value discipline—guiding their companies to extract maximum value from their business spend­ing and investments and, similarly, to deliver value to customers and investors. Value discipline emerges in 2012 as a measured, deliberate, and far-seeing guiding principle—one that CFOs see as a useful counterweight to the short-term pressure to react reflexively to chal­lenging business conditions.

The 2012 Global Business and Spending Monitor yields the following key findings:

• The pace of economic growth is moderating.
• Emerging markets continue to serve as engines of global growth.
• Increasing regulatory pressure, currency-market volatility, and rising prices for raw materials and intermediate goods surface as the most serious threats to growth in 2012.
• Companies will focus their investments on activities that will help their companies to target new growth areas.
• Companies are most likely to increase spend­ing on items that will boost productivity and promote organizational collaboration and alignment.

 

To review how CFOs are responding to challenging business conditions download the full report.

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