Leveraging CIMA to gain global competitive advantages

The 2012 CIMA Global Business Challenge, held in Sri Lanka for the first time, kicked off earlier this week with the 22 teams of four from all across the world battling it out to come out on top. Being held for the fourth year, the Business Challenge attracted 12,000 participants initially.

In Colombo to witness the finals of the competition, CIMA Managing Director Andrew Harding aired his views on this year’s Challenge, went into detail about CIMA’s exciting new joint venture and spoke on Sri Lanka’s incremental progress. Following are excerpts from the interview:

By Cassandra Mascarenhas

Q: Could you tell me why you chose to have the business challenge in Sri Lanka this year and the progress made so far in the competition?

A: What we are doing at the moment is the finals of the global business challenge. We have 22 teams here from around the world and they are the best from a group of 12,000 who started off in this competition. We have people from far and wide, from countries far away as New Zealand, China, South Africa and Ireland. We have a huge geographical spread.

We chose Sri Lanka for a number of reasons. Logistically, it made sense for CIMA because we have an office here and we get the support necessary but more than that, it’s a fantastic venue. It’s exciting for the students to come here, for many of them it is their first time coming to this part of the world. It’s spectacular and exciting for them. They’ve been working really hard during the day and have been taking in Sri Lanka’s nightlife and restaurants in the evenings. It’s been a fantastic venue and we’ve really enjoyed it.

Q: What are your thoughts on the competition this year, in comparison to the previous years?

A: It’s been a really tough competition. This is the fourth year we are running it and we’ve never seen this consistent standard of entry into the competition and I think all of the 22 teams we have here would have gotten through to the final six last year in China. We’ve seen the quality go higher each year.

The most interesting thing is that this competition has been dominated in the past by the Asian teams and the European ones have lagged behind and generally have not done well. It’s very rare for the European teams to get past the first round.

This time it has been different. We have a UK team in the final six, that’s never happened before and we also have a team from Poland in the final six. That’s been a big change, an emergence of the European countries this year.

Q: Looking at the global outlook, what new avenues has CIMA ventured into over the past year and in the first half of this year?

A: The most important thing we’ve done over the last year is entering a joint venture with the American Institute of CPAs. Through that we’ve created a new global designation for management accountants which is the CGMA designation standard for chartered global management accountants. That’s really exciting because it’s the first time that an accounting designation has been genuinely recognised across the whole globe.

Previously we could say that the CIMA qualification had recognition in Europe, Asia and Africa but now with this joint venture, we’ve got the globe covered. I think it is fantastic news for the 4,000 Sri Lankans who enrolled last year and enhances the value of what they are studying.

Q: Does CIMA have any major plans for coming year?

A: Our big effort for the coming year is to make this joint venture a success and genuinely drive the value from it. We’re all about skills and peoples’ careers and this is probably the single biggest project CIMA has got involved in the last 50 years. It’s absolutely huge.

Over the last three years, we’ve done a lot in terms of how we structure ourselves and the way we organise ourselves. We now have a regional structure – Sri Lanka is part of our Middle East, South Asia and North Africa region and regional directors are responsible for running that business rather than London running it.

It’s about being close to the businesses, being close to people and really being able to understand what’s going on so that we can be more responsive and make sure that people have the skills that they need for a successful career.

In this part of the world, over the last three years, we have opened offices in the Middle East, Pakistan and Bangladesh and that’s a lot going on in this part of the world. There is also India with a huge population.

Q: The Western markets are still struggling yet Sri Lanka is on a growth trajectory for most of the part and looking to position itself better in the global arena. How would you say CIMA professionals could play an enabling role in that?

A: In all businesses, CIMA people provide information that help run businesses better and run them well. Their skill is taking complex data and presenting a clear picture from that and that helps businesses take the right decisions for today, tomorrow and the future. That’s the same wherever they are operating around the world.

The Sri Lankan situation is particularly interesting because Sri Lanka has a skill set which means it’s attractive for businesses that want to invest so that fuels local growth and local career opportunities. For years, the CIMA qualification has given Sri Lankans the opportunity to work with the best businesses around the world.

We’ve seen CIMA qualified Sri Lankans working in New York, London and Sydney as well as in Colombo! They are very well travelled and very successful and now we are seeing insurgent growth. After the end of the civil war, we’ve seen businesses becoming increasingly mobile about where they want to go and where they want to put their resources and Sri Lanka is emerging as a key destination.

I guess the challenge for all emerging markets is that it’s very easy to do business with a wage arbitrage but as the economy grows, the ability to use wage arbitrage disappears and it’s about making sure you’ve got that competitive advantage because otherwise, it’s not sustainable and businesses that came in will just as easily walk away again.

We’re starting to see that European businesses are starting to repatriate work that they off-shored five or six years ago simply because that cost advantage is starting to erode. After a business has got that cost advantage, you have to make sure that you get to a globally accepted standard, else you’ll just disappear.

Q: How has the Sri Lanka CIMA chapter performed in comparison to other countries that CIMA operates in?

A: I’ve been with CIMA for three and a half years and every year we’ve seen students here in Sri Lanka get better and better results. The pass rates of exams keep increasing and now it’s pretty close to being on the same level as the UK’s pass rates which is great progress. We just had our exam results out two weeks ago and we had a Sri Lankan as the top in the world in one of the papers and we have got several other prize winners from Sri Lanka.

The real change here has been growth in high quality education and teaching to the extent where Sri Lankan teachers are being hired in companies in India and Malaysia because they can get world class teaching. There has been steady incremental growth over a number of years.

The other change we have seen since the end of the war was that earlier we were primarily Colombo based and now we are starting to operate in towns across the country and that in itself is a great thing because it spreads the opportunity and gives it to people in other towns which is very exciting to see.

The response has been really enthusiastic as students see the great opportunities. We’ve been in Kandy for a couple of years now and two years ago, soon after the war ended, we had colleges set up in Trincomalee and Jaffna. They are small operations but education is about how you regenerate and on Thursday, 25 July, we are opening another college.