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: Globalisation used to mean, by and large, that business expanded from developed to emerging economies. Now it flows in both directions, and increasingly also from one developing economy to another. Business these days is all about “competing with everyone from everywhere for everything”, write the authors of “Globality”, a new book on this latest phase of globalisation by the Boston Consulting Group (BCG).

One sign of the times is the growing number of companies from emerging markets that appear in the Fortune 500 rankings of the world’s biggest firms. It now stands at 62, mostly from the so-called BRIC economies of Brazil, Russia, India and China, up from 31 in 2003 (see chart 1), and is set to rise rapidly. On current trends, emerging-market companies will account for one-third of the Fortune list within ten years, predicts Mark Spelman, head of a global think-tank run by Accenture, a consultancy.

There has been a sharp increase in the number of emerging-market companies acquiring established rich-world businesses and brands (see chart 2), starkly demonstrating that “globalisation” is no longer just another word for “Americanisation”. Within the past year, Budweiser, America’s favourite beer, has been bought by a Belgian-Brazilian conglomerate. And several of America’s leading financial institutions avoided bankruptcy only by going cap in hand to the sovereign-wealth funds (state-owned investment funds) of various Arab kingdoms and the Chinese government.

One example of this seismic shift in global business is Lenovo, a Chinese computer-maker. It became a global brand in 2005, when it paid around $1.75 billion for the personal-computer business of one of America’s best-known companies, IBM—including the ThinkPad laptop range beloved of many businessmen. Lenovo had the right to use the IBM brand for five years, but dropped it two years ahead of schedule, such was its confidence in its own brand. It has only just squeezed into 499th place in the Fortune 500, with worldwide revenues of $16.8 billion last year. But “this is just the start. We have big plans to grow,” says Yang Yuanqing, Lenovo’s chairman.