The conference was organized by the consulting firm AT Kearney on November 16th in Warsaw. Among the invited guests were many prominent politicians. Former President Lech Wałęsa addressed the attendees with a demand for the fair distribution of goods.
– No one will agree that 10 percent of people hold wealth equivalent to 90 percent of all global wealth – said the Nobel Prize laureate.
He also drew attention to the consequences of social inequality. Among them, he mentioned the rule of populists who, wanting to exploit the capital accumulated by the wealthiest, lead the economy to ruin.
– In an era of capital concentration by global corporations, it is necessary to move away from strategic models developed even twenty years ago – said Prof. Andrej Vizjak from AT Kearney in his speech.
Vizjak reported that over the last 10 years, companies have spent over 22 trillion dollars on acquisitions and mergers, which is about half the value of global GDP. The most was spent on such transactions in 2000 (almost 3 trillion dollars) and in 2007, before the last financial crisis (over 3.4 trillion). The result of this concentration is that a few percent of the world’s companies control more than half of the world’s monetary resources.
– Three thousand enterprises control 84 percent of the global economy. (…) About 1.2 thousand of the largest companies control 68 percent of global capital resources – said Vizjak.
– Despite its capabilities, Poland is still on the periphery of the global market – assessed former Minister of Finance of the Republic of Poland, Prof. Grzegorz Kołodko.
Prof. Kołodko pointed out that 80 percent of Polish trade turnover involves contacts with the European Union, which generates only 20 percent of global production.
– Poland has potential, but it is not being utilized because the neoliberal trend still prevails in macroeconomic policy (…) Poland has great opportunities, but the problem all the time lies more in the framework of politics than in economic knowledge on how to exploit these opportunities – concluded Kołodko.
During the conference, the latest publication “Fighting the Business Sharks” by Prof. Andrej Vizjak and Aleksander Kwiatkowski, managing partner at the Polish branch of AT Kearney, was also presented. This book is the result of over twelve years of research on industry concentration, mergers and acquisitions, and strategies for operating in market niches.