Torsten Oltmanns: World Economic Forum 2013 - Insights From Davos

HAMBURG, GERMANY--(Marketwire - Feb 1, 2013) - Last week, 3,000 decision-makers from companies and politics, scientists and journalists met in Davos to analyze the current state of economy and diagnose the most important challenges at the World Economic Forum. "The WEF has often been criticized for recognizing problems too late; however, this remains true: the evaluations of this group of decision-makers develop their own dynamics and will have us deal with them in our companies and media in the coming months", says Dr.Torsten Oltmanns, partner at Roland Berger Strategy Consultants and honorary professor at the university of Innsbruck.

"The question about the 'new normal' of the world economy was the central focus at the WEF", Oltmanns says. "While last year the collapse of the Euro seemed a safe bet, this year was coined by an unexcited optimism. With the USA and China being attested solid chances for economic growth, Europe again became the center of attention: managers and politicians such as the German Chancellor Angela Merkel or the British Prime Minister David Cameron agreed that Europe must drastically improve its competitiveness. British Prime Minister David Cameron's advance in which he doubted Europe's ability to compete and hinted towards Great Britain leaving the EU caused a stir. "The Brits are afraid that this discussion about England leaving the EU might cause considerable insecurity and that it might negatively impact economic growth", Torsten Oltmanns commented in the ZDF newscast „heute".

"In this context, the aspect of re-sourcing of production locations from China into the US is interesting, too: the disadvantages the USA had when it came to costs for labor and energy have so drastically shrunken that many companies consider relocating to the US", Oltmanns observed. Based on this, the German energy transition was once more criticized by German companies in Davos.

Torsten Oltmanns twittered from Davos and published his most important observations in a blog (http://bulletin-from-davos.blogspot.de/); the Zeit has posted the summary of the ten most important conclusions online (http://blog.zeit.de/zweitstimme/2013/01/26/erkenntnisse-aus-davos/).

Torsten Oltmanns is a partner at Roland Berger Strategy Consultants in Berlin and Zurich and he manages the areas of marketing and communication. Additionally, Oltmanns consults companies and the public sector in questions of strategic positioning and is the author of several books and articles about strategy and marketing; also, he is a well-known expert in TV-, radio- and print-media.