Emerging Market Economy

A market is any place in which you buy stuff. Like NASDAQ, or a Safeway store, or your enterprising friend’s online edible underwear business.

The above are mature markets. Or…economically mature, anyway.

Emerging markets are generally new players to a given area of interest. Today, Latin America is becoming a mature market; it even hosted an Olympics. But 30 years ago, still reeling from corrupt dictators in various flavors, it was…emerging.

After the war in Vietnam was done and the napalm had been hosed off the smiling seagulls...this entire region became a market that investors took seriously, as they came to leverage their relatively educated and industrious work forces who assembled computer circuit boards, portable CD players, and vibrating, uh...back scratchers.

The concept of emerging markets also applies to product areas; it doesn’t just have to be a country or countries. In 1995, the internet itself was an emerging product market. It hadn’t existed before. It was very small for about five minutes. And then it just…emerged.

Today, there are essentially zero businesses that aren’t internet business.