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Strategic commentary on institutional change, market posture, leadership alignment.
A monthly read on the trade routes, regulations, and risks and opportunities shaping growth companies and exporters — with one question behind every edition: what does this actually change for you next quarter?
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Attackers took remote control of refrigeration controllers in hundreds of French supermarkets, forcing temperatures to 50°C and causing tens of millions in losses in a single day. No ransom. No claim. The lesson for boards: in hybrid conflict, what you leave exposed matters more than who the attacker is.
Read this editionChina's new chemical investigation shows why mid-size exporters need to track trade defence before their own product appears on the list.
Read this editionArgentina's criminal complaints against Navitas Petroleum and Rockhopper over the Sea Lion project are not a surprise — they are the latest iteration of a campaign running since 2011. The pattern, and what it means for any company operating near a disputed territory or inside an alliance with unresolved sovereignty claims.
Read this editionBritain and Switzerland are moving toward dynamic alignment with EU rules, redrawing the regulatory map for exporters in food, chemicals and agri-inputs.
Read this editionFor a growing number of procurement teams at Swiss and European industrials, the energy contract renewal has quietly become the most consequential item on the calendar this year, or at least, hand in hand with the product launches sitting on the same agenda. What used to be a back-office renewal cycle has become a strategic decision with a closing deadline, and many boards have not yet noticed.
Read this editionResiliency Index series #5
If you lead a mid-sized European company that operates across borders, you almost certainly own a machine like the ones that failed in France last weekend: a controller no one on your board has heard of, installed a decade ago, maintained remotely by a contractor, and still reachable from the internet.
During the night of 11 to 12 October, attackers took remote control of refrigeration controllers made by the Danish group Danfoss in hundreds of French supermarkets: Intermarché, Netto, Coopérative U, Carrefour, Monoprix and several E.Leclerc stores. Reported counts range from about 350 to more than 500 stores. The defrost cycle was forced to run continuously, temperatures reached up to 50°C, and some units caught fire. Intermarché's chief executive spoke of losses of "tens of millions of euros nationwide in a single day".
No ransom was demanded. No data was stolen. No one has claimed it. As of today, neither French authorities nor Danfoss have named a culprit.
The instinct is to read this as a strike on France. The context invites it: on 18 September, President Macron ordered a plan to protect critical infrastructure against intensifying Russian hybrid attacks. It may prove right. But nothing published so far establishes it, and one fact points elsewhere. Internet scans cited by TIME found that France held nearly 60% of the exposed Danfoss controllers detected worldwide. A Reuters source also reported victims in Spain, Portugal, Poland, Germany and Belgium, so far unconfirmed. For now, the more plausible reading is that France was hit less because it is France than because that is where the doors stood open.
What is established, however, is that industrial devices are now a geopolitical target.
In late 2023, a group calling itself Cyber Av3ngers, which US and Israeli agencies describe as a persona of actors affiliated with Iran's Revolutionary Guard, compromised a water-pressure controller in Aliquippa, Pennsylvania. It said it chose the device because its maker, Unitronics, is Israeli. Access came through the default port and default passwords.
In April 2025, hackers opened a valve at a Norwegian dam for about four hours. Norwegian police said pro-Russian hackers were likely responsible.
In April 2026, Sweden linked an attempted destructive attack on a thermal power plant to actors with "connections to Russian intelligence and security services".
France's own cyber agency, ANSSI, reported that in 2024 pro-Russian hacktivists began targeting small industrial sites; one shut down a wind farm for a few hours through an unprotected management interface.
The same Danfoss product line has history. Danfoss's own records, as reported by The Hacker News, note 2022 attacks on 16 Russian supermarkets and 40 Israeli stores; all 40 lacked proper firewall or VPN protection. No attacker was named in either case. The weakness, in other words, was on record four years before it reached French shelves.
Microsoft's 2026 Digital Defense Report points the same way: in the first half of 2026, Ukraine was the country in Europe whose organisations were most often hit.
For business, the lesson is simpler: in hybrid conflict, who the attacker is matters less to your balance sheet than what you leave exposed. A state, a proxy and an opportunist exploit the same unpatched device. Attribution, if it comes, arrives long after the stock is lost.
Microsoft 2025 reports that Russia uses small businesses in NATO countries as entry points to larger organisations, and that Iran targets logistics companies in Europe and the Gulf. ENISA found that almost 80% of incidents against the EU were hacktivism, mostly denial-of-service, and only 2% of those disrupted services. The danger sits in the rare attack that reaches physical equipment.
Regulation helps, but less than it seems. Since 11 September 2026, manufacturers must report actively exploited vulnerabilities in their products within 24 hours under the EU Cyber Resilience Act, whenever those products were sold. But the Act's security requirements do not apply retroactively to products placed on the market before December 2027, and manufacturers must commit to support for as little as five years, for equipment that often runs for fifteen. The gap is yours. In Switzerland, critical-infrastructure operators must report cyberattacks within 24 hours, with failure punishable since 1 October 2025.
Where does our geopolitical exposure meet our digital exposure? Our risk map covers sanctions, tariffs and export controls. Does it also show which sites, products and supplier assets in each market could be switched off from a distance, and by whom that would be useful?
Who owns the risk of the machines we don't think of as IT? Ageing, remotely maintained equipment sits between procurement, operations and IT, and in France the question of who pays is now open. Do our contracts and insurance answer it before a court does?
Is cyber resilience a compliance cost or a commercial asset for us? With EU and Swiss reporting duties now in force, we can invest to meet the floor, or to prove to customers what competitors cannot. Which are we doing?
The fridges in France will be repaired. The question for your board is which of your machines would be next, and whether you would know before your customers did.
*This article reflects the author's analysis of publicly available information as of 14 October 2026. It is provided for general information only and does not constitute legal, financial or business advice. Readers should seek professional advice specific to their circumstances before acting on it.*
Resiliency Index series #4
On 3 October, China's Ministry of Commerce opened an anti-dumping investigation into p-nitrotoluene imported from the European Union. The chemical intermediate is used in dyes, pigments, pesticides and pharmaceuticals. The case was initiated after a petition from two Chinese producers, Jiangsu Huaihe Chemical and Hubei Dongfang Chemical. The applicants allege that import volumes remained high and that prices fell nearly 60% between 2022 and 2025; MOFCOM concluded that the petition contained sufficient evidence to open a formal investigation. The investigation is due to conclude by 3 October 2027, with a possible six-month extension.
Read in isolation, this is a technical trade-remedy case. Read in context, the timing is difficult to ignore. The investigation was announced five days before EU Trade Commissioner Maroš Šefčovič is due to meet Chinese Commerce Minister Wang Wentao in Beijing on 8–9 October, as Brussels presses for tangible progress on rebalancing the trade relationship.
The relevant question for mid-size companies is whether they would recognise the warning signs before their own product became the subject of a trade case.
The European Union is also using its trade-defence instruments more intensively. The European Commission opened 32 new trade-defence investigations in 2025, just below the record set the year before, and says activity is particularly pronounced in chemicals and steel. By the end of 2025, 232 EU trade-defence measures were in force. Chemicals are not new to trade defence. The sector has been subject to anti-dumping and anti-subsidy proceedings for years. What is changing is the intensity of activity and the extent to which individual chemical cases now sit inside the wider political debate over Chinese industrial overcapacity and European economic security.
The political backdrop has hardened as well. In her September State of the Union address, Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said the EU's trade deficit with China had reached roughly €1 billion a day and described the relationship as having reached a "tipping point". She said the EU would use the tools at its disposal to rebalance the relationship.
Industry is pressing in the same direction. European chemical producers have argued that Chinese overcapacity is depressing prices and eroding utilisation rates in Europe. Those claims are helping drive formal trade-remedy petitions and political attention.
China's own response is notable. MOFCOM has explicitly referred to the growing number of EU trade-remedy investigations involving Chinese products, including chemical products. That matters because chemicals are not merely appearing in isolated technical proceedings; Beijing itself is placing those proceedings within the broader EU–China trade dispute.
While governments have been exploring broader international disciplines on structural industrial overcapacity that could complement product-by-product trade remedies, agreement remains elusive. At this week's G20 Trade Ministerial in Milwaukee, trade ministers discussed structural excess capacity and production, but did not agree on a pathway for cooperative action. US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said many members supported action while a handful rejected a common approach.
The picture is not one of complete multilateral paralysis. In steel, the Global Forum on Steel Excess Capacity did reach agreement on a new Milwaukee Framework for joint action. But there is still no economy-wide multilateral rule capable of addressing overcapacity across chemicals, batteries, machinery, solar and other sectors.
In that vacuum, governments are likely to continue relying heavily on national and regional instruments: anti-dumping cases, anti-subsidy measures, safeguards, procurement rules and other forms of trade defence.
1. Small trade flows do not mean small trade-defence exposure. Anti-dumping investigations are initiated at product level. A niche product can become the focus of a formal case if domestic producers bring a qualifying complaint. Mid-size exporters should not assume that limited volumes make them invisible.
2. Exposure is sector- and product-specific, not proportional to company size. The relevant question is not simply whether your company is "in chemicals" or "in China". It is which product codes you sell, which inputs you source, and whether those categories are appearing in either side's trade-remedy activity.
3. Trade defence is procedural, and silence has consequences. MOFCOM gives interested parties a limited window to register and participate in the investigation. Companies that fail to provide information can face determinations based on the facts otherwise available. Early engagement, disciplined pricing records and a clear internal owner for the response can materially affect a company's position.
1. Can we map, product by product, how much of our China revenue, and how much of our China-sourced input, sits in categories already appearing in EU or Chinese trade-remedy cases?
2. If an investigation or new duty touched one of our core products tomorrow, who would own the response, and do our contracts allocate the cost of new duties or customs measures?
3. Do we have the pricing, cost and transaction documentation needed to explain our export prices quickly and credibly if a trade authority asks?
The 8–9 October talks may lower the temperature. They may even produce sector-specific concessions. But they will not remove the trade-defence tools now being used on both sides.
For mid-size growth companies, it becomes fundamental to build enough visibility to recognise when trade-policy pressure is intensifying around their sector or product category, and enough internal capability to respond before a formal investigation becomes a commercial problem.
Resiliency Index series #3
On 6 September, Argentina's Foreign Minister, Pablo Quirno, filed criminal complaints against Navitas Petroleum, alongside Rockhopper Exploration, over their stakes in the Sea Lion offshore oil project near the Malvinas Islands. President Javier Milei called the project a "clear and present danger" in a televised address. Both companies say they hold valid licences from the islands' government and do not expect a material operational impact, but their share prices fell between 6% and 12% on the announcement.
Operating an oil project in waters Argentina claims as its own was never a risk-free decision, and the companies involved knew that when they invested. Argentina has run variations of this same legal campaign against the same project since 2011: a 2015 federal court order to seize $156 million in assets from Rockhopper, Premier Oil, Noble Energy, Edison and Falkland Oil & Gas; a fresh sanctions process against Chrysaor Holdings, Harbour Energy and Navitas in 2023; a 20-year disqualification order against the same companies in December 2025. So considering measures taken by three Argentine administrations in the course of fifteen years, this was never an unforeseeable shock, but a known, mappable risk that a board deciding whether to invest, and deciding how loudly to announce it, could have priced in from year one.
Sovereignty disputes are a well-known business risk for companies operating internationally. Some examples:
Since 2021, the EU's own courts have repeatedly struck down the EU's trade and fisheries agreements with Morocco because they covered Western Sahara, a territory whose sovereignty remains legally unresolved. The General Court annulled the agreements in 2021; the European Court of Justice upheld that annulment in October 2024, ruling that consulting only the population currently present in the territory was not sufficient. The court gave a 12-month transition period, and products sourced there must now be labelled as coming from Western Sahara rather than Morocco. Companies that built agricultural or fisheries supply chains through the territory over the past decade have had to operate through two rounds of legal uncertainty because the underlying sovereignty question was never settled, only administratively worked around.
Even more complex, there are examples that show that a company does not need to be anywhere near a disputed territory to be impacted by geopolitical complexities. In January 2026, after Denmark and seven other NATO allies sent troops to Greenland for a joint Arctic exercise, the US announced a 10% tariff on all imports from Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and the UK, rising to 25% in June, explicitly tied to Washington's ambition to acquire Greenland. Every exporter based in those eight countries, regardless of what they sell or whether they have ever done business in the Arctic, became exposed to a tariff triggered entirely by a sovereignty dispute between allies. Companies in the pharmaceuticals, machinery, food and luxury goods sectors, among many others, absorbed a tariff shock generated by a territorial claim they had no part in and no ability to influence.
For a company weighing a cross-border investment, a new market entry, or a supply chain decision, both patterns point to the same discipline. Sovereignty status should not be treated as a footnote to due diligence; it is a line item, on the same footing as currency risk, tax exposure or regulatory approval timelines, because unlike a currency movement, a sovereignty dispute rarely resolves quickly, and it tends to recur under successive governments long after the original investment decision is forgotten.
Three questions belong in that process before a deal is signed or an investment is announced:
First: does the target market, supplier, or asset sit inside, or depend on, a territory with an unresolved sovereignty question, even one that has produced stable commercial agreements for years? Stability under one government, or one court ruling, is not evidence the underlying question is closed.
Second: if your home country belongs to an alliance or bloc with an unresolved sovereignty dispute involving a major power, is your exposure to that ally's countermeasures — tariffs, export controls, retaliation — well mapped, or only assumed to be someone else's problem? The Greenland tariffs show that geography, not sector, was the determining factor.
Third: does your board review geopolitical and sovereignty exposure with the same rigor that it applies to financial due diligence, before an investment is approved and announced, not after a headline forces the question? It is not about companies avoiding all possible territorial disputes, but about accounting the exposure priced, sized, and owned from the start.
Resiliency Index series #2
On 4 September 2026, the US Trade Representative, Jamieson Greer, told the Financial Times something unusually direct for a trade official: Britain's continued alignment with EU rules is "a problem" for widening the UK-US trade agreement. His complaint was specific. Months after signing a trade deal with Washington in 2025, the UK signed a dynamic alignment arrangement with the EU committing itself to keep pace with EU rules in food, agriculture and chemicals rather than using its post-Brexit freedom to converge with US standards instead.
A lot has been said about the EU and US tensions with China. But here we have the clearest recent signal that the regulatory map European and Swiss exporters have to work with is yet again splitting into two blocs, and the split runs directly through key sectors including food, chemicals and agri-inputs.
The UK-EU commitment goes back to the May 2025 summit reset, where both sides agreed to negotiate a Sanitary and Phytosanitary (SPS) agreement explicitly built on "dynamic alignment" with EU rules, meaning UK regulation moves automatically with future EU changes, not just today's rulebook. The agreement, expected to take effect around mid-2027, will align UK food safety law, pesticide authorisations, residue limits and biocidal product rules with the EU's, removing routine export health certificates that currently cost up to £200 per shipment on UK-EU trade. It also gives the Court of Justice of the EU a role in resolving disputes over how those rules are applied.
That is precisely what Greer objects to. And it is why Britain has held the line on two politically loaded items in its US relationship: chlorinated chicken and hormone-treated beef remain banned, poultry was excluded from the 2025 US deal altogether, and the government treats existing SPS standards as a red line. It appears the UK has chosen its regulatory camp.
For Swiss readers, this is not a foreign story. On 2 March 2026, Switzerland and the EU signed their own "Bilaterals III" package, covering food safety, electricity, health and market access, built on the same dynamic alignment principle: Switzerland commits to adopting relevant EU legislative acts as they evolve, with disputes going to a new arbitral tribunal rather than a Swiss court. There is a democratic safeguard, a Swiss referendum that can reject a specific EU act, but the direction of the architecture is the same one Britain has just been criticised for by Washington.
Put the UK and Swiss moves together and a pattern forms: the EU's regulatory perimeter, in food, agriculture and chemicals specifically, is becoming a single de facto standard shared by the EU, the UK and, pending ratification, Switzerland. The US is moving in the opposite direction, and it is doing so with visible frustration at being left out.
For a mid-size Swiss or EU company exporting into all three markets, this cuts two ways. On the UK-EU-Switzerland side, dynamic alignment is, on balance, good news: one compliance standard is emerging where two used to sit, and the mid-2027 SPS deal should mean fewer certificates, fewer border checks, and less duplicated regulatory work for food, plant and chemical exporters moving goods between the EU, UK and eventually Switzerland's aligned sectors. That is a genuine simplification worth planning around now, not after it takes effect.
The other side is less comfortable. A US administration that is publicly irritated by "Brussels over America" alignment has tariff leverage, and it has used it before. Companies with meaningful US revenue that also depend on EU-aligned compliance in food, chemicals or agri-inputs should treat the current UK-US friction as an early indicator, not background noise.
First: do your compliance and commercial functions still treat the UK as a separate regulatory jurisdiction from the EU? If your organisation maintains parallel UK and EU registration, labelling or certification processes for food, plant health or chemical products, start scoping what changes once the SPS agreement takes effect around mid-2027. If the transition is planned ahead, the cost savings are real.
Second: if you are a Swiss company, is your regulatory affairs team tracking the Bilaterals III ratification timeline as closely as it tracks EU legislative changes directly? The referendum risk means the timeline is not fixed, and a company that assumes the package is settled law before Swiss voters have had their say could be planning around a date that moves.
Third: for companies with material exposure to both the EU-aligned bloc and the US market, is there a scenario plan for a specific trade or tariff dispute? In other words, the concrete possibility that Washington uses the leverage Greer described?
Resiliency Index series #1
For a growing number of procurement teams at Swiss and European industrials, the energy contract renewal has quietly become the most consequential item on the calendar this year, or at least, hand in hand with the product launches sitting on the same agenda. What used to be a back-office renewal cycle has become a strategic decision with a closing deadline, and many boards have not yet noticed.
The deadline is not speculative. On 26 January 2026, the Council of the EU gave final approval to the regulation phasing out Russian gas imports. The mechanics are specific: an initial ban on new import contracts takes effect six weeks after the regulation's entry into force; the full ban on Russian LNG becomes binding on 1 January 2027; the full ban on pipeline gas follows in autumn 2027. There is a transition window for contracts already in place, built in precisely to limit market disruption, but that window is the point. It is finite, and it is already running.
Layer onto this a second, less predictable pressure. Brent crude crossed $100 a barrel in early 2026 for the first time since August 2022, driven by the war in the Middle East and disruption to the Druzhba pipeline following a drone strike on Ukrainian territory. By June, prices had moderated to roughly $94, still nearly 30% above pre-conflict levels, thanks to unusually deep global inventories and coordinated strategic releases. But moderated is not the same as low, and the ECB itself has flagged that an extended disruption to a chokepoint like the Strait of Hormuz could still deplete those buffers and reopen the price pressure.
Put these two forces together and you get a squeeze that is specific to European industrials. A legislative floor is being placed under gas costs at precisely the moment that oil-linked energy pricing is elevated and volatile. American manufacturers are not subject to the same import bans. Gulf producers are, if anything, benefiting from the price environment. European energy-intensive companies - chemicals, food and agriculture processing, advanced manufacturing, anyone running continuous-process operations - are absorbing both pressures simultaneously, and the regulatory one will not lift regardless of what oil markets do next.
Energy buyers who have already gone to market for fixed-price renewable power purchase agreements or secured alternative LNG sourcing report the same pattern: counterparties are pricing in the 2027 deadlines now, and the pool of long-term capacity at competitive terms is shrinking as more buyers compete for the same contracts. A long-term PPA or LNG supply agreement typically takes a financial quarter to structure, negotiate and close, even before you count the internal approval cycle most Swiss and EU companies also need to run. Work backward from the January 2027 LNG deadline and the autumn 2027 pipeline deadline, and October 2026 is where the arithmetic runs out: it is roughly the last point at which a company can start a negotiation and reasonably expect to close it, on competitive terms, before the market for that remaining capacity tightens further.
This means that the negotiating leverage a company has today is not the leverage it will have in January. Suppliers know the deadlines as well as buyers do.
For a board or CFO evaluating this now, three questions are more useful than a generic "review your energy strategy" mandate.
First: does the company currently hold any contract for Russian-origin pipeline gas or LNG, directly or through a supplier that has not disclosed its sourcing? The transition provisions in the regulation are not indefinite, so due diligence on the supply chain is now a compliance question as much as a cost question. The penalties written into the regulation are not symbolic: a minimum of €40 million or 3.5% of global annual turnover for corporate non-compliance, whichever is greater.
Second: has procurement been given a mandate to negotiate a multi-year fixed-price agreement with alternative sourcing, and is that mandate moving at the speed the market now requires? In many mid-sized industries, energy procurement still reports through general operations rather than through a function with direct access to the C-suite. A solid and executive mandate and the right reporting structure for procurement functions is fundamental when energy is a deadline-driven strategic exposure with a legal floor under it.
Third, and most concretely: what does the company's exposure look like if nothing changes before the transition provisions expire? Modeling that scenario with real numbers tends to be the single most effective way to get procurement timelines taken seriously at the top of an organization.
None of this requires predicting where oil prices go next, which nobody can do reliably. What can be planned for is the part that is already written into EU law: the deadlines are fixed, the transition window is finite, and the companies moving now will negotiate from a materially stronger position than the ones that wait for the deadline to become urgent on its own. October is not a symbolic date. It is the point past which the arithmetic of "close a competitive long-term contract before the ban bites" stops working cleanly. For energy-intensive exporters, that makes procurement one of the more consequential strategic decisions on the calendar this quarter.
Positioning for markets where the rules are moving.
The decisions that demand more than consensus.
Working through competing institutional and commercial truths.
There is a moment many CEOs of internationally operating companies recognise, even if they rarely say it aloud. A call from a minister's office they weren't expecting. A regulation their competitors somehow saw coming. A contract that evaporated — not over price or product, but because the other side chose a company with deeper roots in the local ecosystem. That is the moment the realisation lands: the world outside the organisation is no longer background noise. It is the game itself.
For most of the last three decades, running an international business meant hiring good local teams, managing currency exposure, and adapting your product to local tastes. The political environment was a constraint you worked around, not a terrain you cultivated. That model is now obsolete.
The way global commerce works is shifting under our feet. The rules of market access — what can be sold, sourced, or built, and where — are increasingly set to serve strategic ends, not commercial ones. And whether a company can operate in a given market is now answered less in boardrooms than in government offices, standards bodies, and multilateral forums where most business leaders have no presence, no voice, and no relationships. The CEO who doesn't see may be flying blind.
Here is a simple test. When your strategy team presents the three-year plan, how much of it accounts for a serious shift in trade policy between your two largest markets? How much of your supply-chain planning assumes the political relationships governing your key corridors stay stable? If the honest answer is "not much," you are exposed.
Geopolitical risk used to be a form of insurance: identify the scenarios, price them, buy cover or accept the downside. What has changed is the frequency and speed of consequential shifts. In a single year, a mid-size European company can face new export controls on its technology, revised rules of origin that restructure its procurement, a sanctions regime that severs a key supplier, and market-access conditions that suddenly hinge on bilateral politics no amount of local adaptation can fix. Not to mention the "informal" restrictions based merely on political alignment.
The question is no longer whether geopolitics will affect your business. It is whether you will find out early enough to do something about it. There is another key question: can I turn this risk into opportunity?
The companies that navigate this well share one trait: their leaders are embedded in the external world — not just reading the Financial Times, but present in the rooms where signals appear early. Industry coalitions, policy forums, bilateral chambers, multilateral organizations corridors and working groups. They know which conversations are happening before they become announcements. That lead time is the difference between adapting and reacting.
Ambitious mid-size companies in regulated sectors — energy, biotech, agrifood, technology, climate infrastructure — carry a regulatory burden that rivals many multinationals, without the policy teams or Brussels presence to match. They are disproportionately shaped by rules they had no hand in writing and little visibility into before they arrived.
This is not a complaint about regulation. It is an observation about power. Regulation is shaped by those who show up. Industry associations, public consultations, standard-setting bodies, bilateral regulatory dialogues — these are not bureaucratic footnotes. They are the architecture of the market. The companies at those tables help build it. The ones absent read the manual after it's published.
A CEO who treats regulatory engagement as the legal team's job is outsourcing a strategic function. When the European Commission drafts the next carbon border rules, or a Southeast Asian market rewrites its data-localisation requirements, the companies in the room are not there by accident. They invested in presence, in relationships, and in the credibility that comes from being a consistent, substantive voice. For a mid-size company, even those with a government-affairs department, it requires the CEO to decide it is part of the job.
There is a kind of "networking" every senior leader has learned to dread: the conference circuit, the identical conversations, the badge scanning. This is not that.
A well-cultivated external network is one of the most valuable assets a company can hold, because it is a real-time intelligence system no market-research firm can replicate. When a peer CEO in an adjacent sector mentions their logistics provider has started pricing a key corridor differently, that is a signal. When a former regulator you've stayed close to notes a directive is being reconsidered, that is a signal. When a contact at a bilateral chamber tells you the political mood in a market you're entering has shifted, that is a signal — and you have it weeks or months before it reaches an analyst report.
Information asymmetry has always been a source of advantage. What's changed is that the information that matters most now flows through relationships, not databases.
In practice, business diplomacy is unglamorous and specific: maintaining real relationships with two or three people who understand the political landscape of each key market, before you need them; participating in — not just paying dues to — the industry bodies that engage regulators on your sector's behalf; building ties with counterpart companies in strategic markets, including ones you don't yet do business with; knowing which institutions and standards bodies write the rules of your sector, and showing up there; and treating officials, trade attachés, and development agencies as partners in your market strategy rather than obstacles.
One thing separates the largest multinationals from everyone else in external affairs: they built their relationships over decades. A company like ABB, Nestlé, or Roche doesn't scramble for access when a policy conversation opens in a market it cares about. It is already in the room. That is the product of consistent presence and the institutional trust that only accumulates over time.
For a mid-size company the gap is real — but not insurmountable, because what earns that trust is not scale. It is showing up consistently, doing what you said you would, contributing genuine expertise, and being an organisation others can count on. In many policy processes, mid-size companies with real sector knowledge and clear, credible voices are actively sought out — precisely because they aren't seen as pursuing purely self-interested agendas.
And the window is open now. In ten years, the relationships your competitors are building today will be closed networks. The time to start is before you need it — not the morning you read the announcement that changes your market.
Picture the company with no external presence at all. A market-question arises and there is no one to call. A regulatory change creates an opening and it is not positioned to benefit. A crisis hits — and in international business one eventually always does — and it responds from a standing start, without the relationships, credibility, or context to navigate it.
There is a quieter cost, too. The best people — those who operate at the intersection of business, policy, and geopolitics — want to work for organisations that take the external world seriously. Insularity compounds.
None of this means abandoning the operational priorities that built the company. It means recognising that external engagement is no longer a distraction from running the business. It is part of running it well.
The CEOs who will lead the strongest international companies of the next decade are not only operators and allocators. They understand that the world outside the organisation is a terrain to be cultivated, that relationships are a strategic asset, and that the skills of diplomacy — patience, presence, and the ability to build trust across difference — are no longer optional for anyone whose business crosses a border.
*This article is part of the Resiliency Index series, exploring how mid-size companies with international operations can build durable competitive advantage in a more complex world.*