It can be tempting for foreign players to look at the operating and marketplace challenges that Australian enterprises face and see only quality problems. It’s a temptation that should be resisted.

We, at Genpact, very quickly learned as much after being invited to help a top 20 Australian company fix procurement processes that had been undercutting its overall financial performance. To begin to appreciate just how “great” the client’s environmental challenges have been (in both the positive and negative sense), consider the following:
• The International Monetary Fund recently declared Australia the strongest economy in the developed world and predicted it would outperform all other advanced economies combined through 2014.
• Australia has far less exposure to troubled European banks than other nations. Although the country boasts a 60-percent home ownership rate, fewer than 7 percent of its mortgages were underwater at the start of 2012 (compared to 30 percent in the United States).
• Nationwide unemployment in Australia also stands at an enviable 5.2 percent.

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