From Country-specific newsletters to focus reports on individual sectors or risks
We offer continuous coverage in form of a bi-weekly Newsletter (Sign up below!), Research Notes, an annual Country Risk Report as well as our Focus Reports on strategic industries like the Turkish construction, defense and tourism industry or industries like the jewelry industry. The latter officially ranks as the fifth largest Turkish industry but is hardly more than an expensive way of buying gold for Turks (more about that in an upcoming issue of our newsletter). On top of that, we look at sectors with growth potential and feature portraits of individual companies that excel in both product development and execution.
We will soon launch a paid version of our Newsletter as well as a subscription plan that includes access to our Research Notes. As of now, our Country Risk Report and our Focus Report are sold individually and delivered to your mailbox as a PDF.
Custom Scenarios
We will create qualitative, narrative scenarios you can rely on to guide your thinking and decision-making process. You don’t need us to generate the fancy version of an Excel sheet for you. We can develop scenarios that identify, forecast and assess the obstacles, risks, threats and vulnerabilities as well as opportunities related to your:
- Non-financial assets
e.g. real estate, intellectual property
- Financial assets
Currency/FX, fixed income, commodities as well debt (Sovereign debt, private debt, company debt or bank debt)
- Company
Your business objectives, policies or strategies, your business model or operations (i.e. objectives and critical decisions aiming at lowering costs or growing sales, market share or yield, entering or leaving markets or planned investments), ESG compliance and your brand reputation
- Transactions
e.g. M&A’s or distribution partnerships or supplier negotiations
Here is how we analyze risk and create forecasts
When we talk about the risk environment we differentiate between ten different dimensions of risk but always consider the total picture. Particularly in emerging and frontier economies risks are extremely entwined and highly contagious.
We predict risk along these dimensions:
- Economic Risk
- Financial Risk
- Socioeconomic Risk
- Infrastructural Risk
- Reputational Risk
- Security Risks
- Man-made health hazards and disasters
- Natural Risks
- Compliance Risks (in particular ESG)
- Multidimensional Risk – The degree of preparedness and resilience towards mega-trends
e.g. Globalization, Digitization, Automation or Climate Change
- Political Risk
While the other nine dimensions are straightforward, it makes sense to disentangle the term “political risk”. The way the term is used most of the time renders it useless.
Geopolitical risk or Inter-Country Political Risk
The dynamic perspective, i.e. looking at countries as actors. The risk of non-peaceful relations between countries.
The static perspective, i.e. looking at the given geographical setup of a country, it’s natural and human geography and the resultant advantages and disadvantages.
Intra-country Political Risk
Polity (form)
The constitutional setup of institutions, their division of labor, checks and balances and legal norms.
Policy (content)
The policies of central or local government and its ministries or departments or other state institutions like the Central Bank. This includes taxes, regulations, interest rates for example but also expropriation risk.
Politics (process)
The game of politics, the process of negotiating interests between governmental and non-governmental actors.
Our Risk Analysis Framework
To identify, forecast, assess (i.e. describe and measure) risks and threats we ask these questions first:
When?
What is the time frame of the forecast?
- Is this a current or future risk or threat?
- Is it an unfolding, discrete event, a shock, as opposed to an open-ended crisis or a trend?
- Is it an unfolding, open-ended risk or threat or a full-blown crisis (depending on the impact, degree of preparedness etc.)?
- Is it a growing trend (from global trends like automatization to domestic trends like the growth of the so-called “deist generation” in Turkey)?
- Or is it a cyclical, recurring event?
What is the time frame in months and years?
- Within the next 6 months?
- Within the next 12 months?
- Within the next 2, 5, 30, 50 years?
- Around or even on a particular date (“set the clock for it”)?
Where?
- Global?
- Regional?
- Country-level?
- Local?
What is the origin of the risk or threat?
- External (from regional to global…)
- Internal
What kind of risk or threat is it?
- What is the reach (e.g. parts of the operation to all of the operation are in danger)? Is there potential for contagion, wider consequences (from shock to crisis)?
- What is the magnitude of the impact (from almost painless and a mere bump in the road to destabilizing and finally to painful or even life-threatening)? Are we are talking about the mere risk of volatility (through an imbalance/fragility/instability) or a full-blown “attack”?
- What is the order of magnitude of the impact? (first-, second- or third-order?)
How will the risk transform into an actual threat?
- What are potential triggers?
- What are potential catalysts?
Describing the risk, taking more than one attribute into account
- Does the risk qualify as an extreme event? (rare, hard to predict, very wide reach, very strong impact etc.) If so, what kind of extreme event?
Of natural origin: earthquake, storm, flood, drought, pandemic etc.
Of social origin: war, infrastructure failure (dam breaking, nuclear plant exploding)
- Does the risk or threat qualify as a trend? (growing, possibly self-enforcing)
- Or does the risk qualify as an inflection point or an obstacle? Can you pretty much set the clock for it to happen at a certain time or around a certain time? (e.g. expected death of leader because of old age; scheduled events like elections that are guaranteed to be contested or destabilizing etc.), see time frame, above.
How confident are we about our prediction, in terms of:
- Predictability (from “guesswork” to “almost certain”)
- Accuracy of the Prediction in terms of time, location, reach, magnitude of impact etc.
Next Step: Risk Management
When risks and threats as well as their vectors have been established, we look for the respective vulnerabilities, and develop strategies and plans to build preparedness and resilience.
First we assess your current state of preparedness and resilience, looking for gaps in your armor. When we have identified gaps in your preparedness and resilience, we look for ways to build or improve your preparedness and resilience. We help you avoid, reduce and transfer risks.
In the middle of battle or after the fact and the damage is already done, we help you to build a strong response as well as mitigate the damage done and recover swift and as unscathed as possible.
Finally, we develop strategies and plans to prevent future damage and vulnerabilities (see above).
Red Mining as part of stress testing
You probably have your own risk model already, but you might feel unsure about the validity of individual assumptions and inputs. We can attack individual assumptions or the entire risk model and its predictions and try to verify or falsify it.
Future: A Dashboard for Dynamic Risk and Threat Monitoring
Describing vectors, path dependencies, institutional change over decades might sound more like an academic endeavor but like tectonic plates overlapping, pushing or crashing into each other, these vectors create pressures and frictions and can explode outright. And while you will never be able to set the alarm for it to happen, you will be able to prepare and raise the alert level in the organization.
We are right now developing a dashboard that reveals these vectors and the otherwise hidden fragilities and imbalances they create. We will invite you to a free trial as soon as we are ready.
How we deliver and how we price our custom research
Custom Scenario
A custom scenario with around 30 pages costs upwards of 15,000 EUR and normally requires 8 weeks till delivery. If you need it faster, let us know. It will come at a slightly higher price but whenever we have capacity we will try to accommodate you. The online briefing on delivery will be short and crisp but ask away, we don’t want to put a time limit on briefings, but want you to benefit from our findings as much as possible.
General Research Assignments and Red Mining Reports
If the job is to answer one or several research questions or to validate individual assumptions and inputs of an existing scenario, the price is lower of course, between 4000-8000 EUR. The delivery time depends on the project but will generally be around 2-4 weeks.
Ad hoc judgement calls
If a turn of events or a policy change has taken you by surprise, and you need an ad hoc assessment of the situation, please get in touch! If we have something to contribute on the spot, and have the capacity, we will deliver a bullet-point analysis to you within 48 hours with prices starting at 1200 EUR.