Going Abroad

摘要

For many U.S. M/E/P engineering firms designing industrial facilities, the world is getting both bigger and smaller. What's growing is the number of international industrial projects that U.S. firms are involved in. What's shrinking are the borders and barriers to designing factories abroad-both real and psychological. In the hot markets of Asia and Latin America, there has been a paradigm shift over the last decade in how U.S. A/E firms operate. There are two key factors operating here. First, rather than designing facilities for the manufacture of export goods that come back to the United States, A/E firms report an increasing focus on industrial facilities that supply the domestic markets within those countries. With consumer demand on the rise-especially in China, which has the fastest growing economy in the world-the U.S. and foreign multinational clients that American A/Es serve are building factories abroad to break into local markets.