With more companies looking to take advantage of growth territories, there is a trend for firms to appoint a head of emerging markets.

This was one of the messages to come from a Knowledge Exchange Business Breakfast held last week in London and hosted by executive search firm SpenglerFox. The discussions centred around the economic trends and opportunities in the emerging markets of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), the Middle East and regions in Africa.

Nenad Pacek, president of Global Success Advisors, told the invited senior executives gathered from various sectors that he believed we would look back at 2010 as a “symbolic moment”.

He explained that 160 years after the Industrial Revolution, emerging markets are now exactly the same size as the developed world in terms of GDP at purchasing power parity. And their economic power will increase since their growth rates will outperform developed markets for years to come.

Pacek said multi-nationals opening up in these emerging markets were moving away from using expats, which he described as a “dying animal”, to set up new hubs. Firms need to nurture locally grown talent to build relationships, which are especially important in the emerging markets.

For multi-national firms from the developed world, he told the audience, the biggest threat was competition from the emerging markets. “There are now 700 Chinese companies with global ambition,” he said.

To outperform such competition, companies need to look at each market in segments, he suggested. From his experience working with over 200 multi-national firms, there was a growing trend to appoint a head of emerging markets to decide in which new countries to invest.

During the discussions, the senior executives also recognised that organisations were giving more autonomy to the people on the ground in the new markets and were becoming less centralised. There was a shift in companies to a geography-driven and not a business-unit driven model.

For more on emerging markets, see News and Guide to Emerging Markets in the latest issue of Recruiter, out tomorrow.