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Along with sophisticated markets in Europe and Canada (which this year for the first time fell slightly behind Europe in the amount of U.S. investment), globalization is also stretching out to developing markets in Africa, Latin America and the Far East. A total of $11.4 billion has been invested in Latin America, where U.S. companies make and sell everything from automobiles to Mexican peanut butter. Another $10 billion has been committed to Africa and Asia. For example, the Gillette Co., which already controls 60% of the European razor-blade market and which last week also took over the big West German appliance firm of Braun, is now moving in on Africa with its Nacet blades. Gillette offers shaves to Africans who have previously trimmed their whiskers with knives, in its advertisements plays up to crocodile-conscious natives its Nacet trademark—a blade slicing through a croc.
In Asia, although markets are slim at the moment, U.S. companies are concentrating on the future, mindful that the population of the region totals 1.8 billion, with the children alone outnumbering the combined populations of Europe and Africa. Jersey Standard is diligently building a civilian market in Viet Nam in spite of the war. Esso installations occasionally get in the way of the combatants; a 10,000-gal. tank burned for three days after it was hit in a Viet Cong attack on Tan Son Nhut Airport. The Cong also bushwhack Esso oil trucks and force the drivers to pay ransom. But overall, says Esso Viet Nam's placid manager, Frederick W. Penn, "the thing unusual about us is the extent to which operations here are so usual." 13,000-Mile Umbilicus. Under Haider, local managers like Penn are getting more autonomy. More and more companies are adopting the same system. "You can't run a day-to-day business with a 13,000-mile umbilicus," says Roland Pierotti, executive vice president of the Bank of America. Like Jersey and its four new companies, U.S. corporations are rejiggering tables of organization to keep up with a fast-moving world of business. Ford established Ford of Europe to supervise all its European automaking, General Electric retailored its international division so that man agers are now responsible for the same product lines abroad as well as at home. Dow Chemical, which pioneered this sort of thinking by setting up an almost autonomous Dow Chemical Europe in Zurich, is now, says President Herbert Doan, "a global company, whose headquarters happen to be in Midland, Mich."
One reason for such corporate structures as Esso Europe, Ford Europe and Dow Europe, is that the European Common Market—as an inevitable fore runner of other regional trade groups across national borders —demands a regional approach. U.S. businessmen, already accustomed to regionalism in the States, grasped the significance of the Common Market long before the Europeans who had conceived it. "The Americans," says Andre Danzin, director general of the French electronics firm of Csf., "understood immediately what a large market could be. Europeans could not imagine the possibilities a bigger market would give them, and they were too late to realize it."