The world is changing rapidly. Where are the sources of revenue and profit going to be for your business tomorrow? If you need to understand how political trends will affect regulations for your industry in Chile, how disposable income is changing for 30-35-year-old women in Poland or when a frontier market in Sub-Saharan Africa will become mainstream, we can help.

We understand that businesses need to identify where the next opportunity is coming from so that they can act fast to seize it.

Our knowledge of economics, politics and socio-demographics is second to none. If you need to see into the future, we can help.

Our team comprises experts on every country in the world. If you need to know how quickly the US will grow over the next five years or what residential construction will take place in Saudi Arabia, we can help. Or in Thailand, Algeria or Kazakhstan. But sometimes five years is not enough.

Many of our clients have investment horizons measured in decades. Our proprietary methodologies let us look ahead 30 years or more, using frameworks you can understand and rely on.

And if countries are too broad for your business, we forecast growth, spending, income and investment in cities from Dongguan to Dhaka.

We are able to draw upon the knowledge of a large pool of country and industry experts, as well as proprietary economic and risk models, to help clients identify new markets and perform better in existing ones in a fast-changing world. Through our structured cross-market research and forward-looking data and analysis we help you to understand how changing economic conditions affect your business:

Which are my priority markets today and in the future?

How do I move into new markets?

What external factors will affect the markets I operate in today?

Which product categories will perform best over the next five years?

Success in business means the considered embracing of risk—without risk, there can be no reward. This means that risk management is an ongoing part of business life. But in order to manage risk, you need to measure it. How? We have tools and models that help to combine quantifiable risks such as default rates with qualitative issues such as political or regulatory instability. We use these tools to help companies do everything from managing their supply chain to setting location-specific discount rates.

Clients decide which countries to enter, which suppliers to order from and which logistics routes to use based on our bespoke dashboards. And, if you are focused on financial risks, we are a registered credit rating agency for assessing sovereign creditworthiness. We also assess exchange-rate and banking risks.

We are the experts in data modelling and analysis. We use the very latest techniques to model our clients' sales data, helping them to predict how their business will perform. Some even share our analysis with their suppliers to help to inform their production decisions. But we also produce bespoke models for other purposes.

If you need to understand how a country or industry will respond to an event like a currency crash or energy shock, we can model that too.

Or, if you are doing business planning, we can provide country, industry or market scenarios based on expert judgement, modelling or facilitated debates within your organisation.

We do not just look at countries or cities. We also analyse industries. Our speciality is to understand the intersection between industry developments and the surrounding economic, political and regulatory context. Our team has expertise in financial services, telecoms and technology, consumer goods and retail, automotive, healthcare and pharmaceuticals, commodities and energy.

So if you need to dive deep on banking in Peru, tablets in Romania or mining in Mongolia, we can help.

We can also help to unravel the supply chain, identify the key regulatory decision-makers, analyse the purchasing decisions or pinpoint the logistical bottlenecks.

If you need to make a decision, you need to rank the options. But how to do that when the key decision factors vary from economic to political, from cultural to geological? The Economist Intelligence Unit's benchmarking and indexing capabilities can help. We are experts in combining qualitative and quantitative data, and weighting it together to form league tables and conduct multi-dimensional comparisons.

We have helped companies to rank cities by their attractiveness to the car-rental industry, benchmarked the incentives offered in special economic zones for the technology industry and prioritised markets in Central America for a financial services firm. We have even produced rankings of countries' peacefulness for a philanthropic organisation, and benchmarked the security regime that countries apply to their stocks of nuclear material.

We have an especially deep capability in healthcare across developed and emerging markets. We offer services to insurers and payers, helping to design clinical care pathways, undertake medical evidence reviews and consult on value-based health. We help pharmaceutical and medical technology firms to demonstrate value.

We advise on strategy in all areas of healthcare using techniques such as horizon scanning and megatrend analysis. We provide market insight to pharmaceutical and medical technology firms and clinical providers through our market intelligence, market sizing, channel optimisation and commercial due diligence capabilities.

Go to our healthcare page

China is the second-largest economy in the world, and is the top destination for many international firms looking to grow. China is also home to many of the world's up-and-coming businesses, which are increasingly looking to expand in other emerging markets and also in western Europe and the US. Unsurprisingly, it is a market where we have exceptional expertise.

Our Beijing and Shanghai team routinely tracks and forecasts developments in 287 cities across the country to help our clients win in China. And, for our Chinese clients, we tap into our worldwide team of experts to assess opportunity, help to manage risk and advise on strategy in any market in the world—and deliver our conclusions in China, in Chinese.