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Commercial Intelligence
Commercial intelligence is focused on providing executives and managers with timely actionable intelligence regarding pending strategic and operational decisions that will have an impact on their success in a foreign environment.
There are eight key service categories incorporated within this sector:
- Competitive Intelligence
- Market Intelligence
- Partner Intelligence
- Supplemental Due Diligence
- Commercial Counter-Terrorism
- Research and Investigations
- Corporate Responsibility Investigations and Reports
- Ad Hoc Services
Competitive Intelligence
These services incorporate the identification of essential trends about market dynamics, key market players and regulators, competitor activities and emerging domestic technologies. Competitive Intelligence provides our clients with a baseline from which they can competitively penetrate a target market, and/or remain proactive within their competitive environment.
Market Intelligence
Unlike market research that provides generic assessments about market indicators, market intelligence identifies (from a macro perspective) vertical industry groupings, country and trade organization, and social, political, economic and environment issues (i.e. barriers to entry) that are likely to have both a direct and indirect impact on client interests in a given market.
Partner Intelligence
After gaining actionable intelligence about the relevance of the target market to our client, SAM helps its clients further enhance their market penetration by providing detailed profiles about proposed alliance partners, covering areas such as: Discussion Progress between your organization and the proposed partner, Biographies on key individuals and beneficiaries in the partnering organization, the Customer Base of the proposed partner, their business operations, competing partnerships, and so on.
Supplemental Due Diligence
SAM's Supplemental Due Diligence goes a step beyond conventional due diligence by focusing on 'Hidden Risk Factors' (HRFs) - passive and non-passive, legal and illegal factors that may influence the outcome of any operation or transaction.
Supplemental Due Diligence focuses on providing clients with 'facts' that are difficult to uncover and access in emerging markets where analysis must be filtered through local cultural and behavioral protocols.
The nine key HRF headings that SAM investigates are:
- corruption,
- bureaucracy,
- counterfeiting and theft,
- cultural issues,
- legal safeguards,
- organized crime,
- unfair trade and competition,
- asset security, and
- terrorism and extremism.
HRFs have a high impact on the security and performance of assets, which can threaten the success of interests and projects in foreign markets. The greatest danger, however, is that these factors not only cause under-performance, but also threaten the cessation of performance altogether.
Commercial Counter-Terrorism
In the aftermath of 9/11 and the dramatic upsurge in terrorist attacks that have followed, corporations involved in international transactions must consider the impact of terrorist activity and the subsequent impact of counter-terrorism legislation.
SAM therefore ensures that its clients are informed of counter-terrorism legislation in the markets in which they are active and how this legislation can impact their various activities and transactions.
Research and Investigations
Research and Investigations generally provide our clients with an additional layer of scrutiny and verification that they require prior to committing resources. All data and analysis obtained is related to client needs and objectives.
Examples of specific tasks serviced by SAM include:
- Background screening and CV verification
- Criminal and civil litigation support
- Corporate records
- Company shareholders
- Brand Protection: Counterfeit Production and IPR issues
- Employee theft and embezzlement
- Permits, licenses and approvals
- Financial matters (including debt and asset verification, asset tracing, sources of capitalization)
- Partnerships, alliances, links and associations
- Key management and others persons of influence
- Litigation, liens and liabilities
- Fraud, embezzlement, defaults and disputes
- Insurance fraud
- Raw materials trafficking and distribution
- Theft of trade secrets (industrial espionage and counter-intelligence)
- Political and economic analysis (identification of 'relevant' government structures)
- Organized crime analysis (alliances, links, associations, strength and influence, encroachment)
Corporate Responsibility Investigations and Reports
Corporate responsibility investigations and reports are directed at clients who have established operations in countries throughout the world and are placed under constant pressure to incorporate sensitive issues such as community relations, company accountability, corporate governance, corruption, environmental policy and planning, human rights and labor practices/relations into corporate policy decisions.
To this end, SAM offers three inter-related corporate responsibility services:
- Analyzing existing corporate responsibility profiles against SAM's Corporate Governance Quotient, which measures levels of transparency and adherence to international corporate governance standards;
- Identification of issues that affect corporate responsibility policy in the clients areas of operation; and,
- Advice for the future development of such policy.
Ad Hoc Services
SAM has the capacity and capability to provide a range of ad hoc SRA services, including:
- Monitoring a defined set of targets (i.e. market alerts with competitive implications, mergers and acquisitions, alliances)
- Profiling identified competitors, partners or adversaries (i.e. criminal or terrorist groups)
- Simulation / Deal Support to help a client anticipate competitive responses and to respond to a variety of probable and possible scenarios
- Miscellaneous Requests (i.e. company financial comparisons, open source information searches, executive biographies, international business search)