Abraaj chief concurs with thesis that BRIC obsolete term

By Andrei Skvarsky.

Facts that the chief executive of Dubai-based investment firm Abraaj cites in a recent article corroborate the thesis of British bank Coutts that BRIC is an obsolete concept.

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Both Abraaj CEO Arif Naqfi and Coutts analysts argue that the economic performance of Brazil, Russia, India and China has ceased to make them stand out in the emerging market world.

“The world of growth markets is made up of more than the four BRIC countries,” Naqfi says in an article entitled “Investing in a Reshaping World” and written for The Huffington Post and the World Economic Forum.

“The Pacific Alliance countries (Mexico, Peru, Colombia and Chile) are collectively already the same size as Brazil in GDP terms and they are growing twice as fast. In South East Asia, private consumption per capita is already as high as in China today. Africa has higher GDP per capita and more people in the middle class than India,” Naqfi says.

Researchers at Coutts, a lender headquartered in London and owned by Royal Bank of Scotland, spoke in the same vein in its Today & Tomorrow investment outlook for 2014, but also said the economies of Brazil, Russia, India and China were much too different in size and performance to see the four nations as forming any distinctive group.

The term BRIC was coined by Jim O’Neill of Goldman Sachs in 2001 to highlight the four countries as rivals to the Group of Seven.

Abraaj manages $7.5bn in assets and has 25 offices in Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Middle East.

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