Globant seeks to double sales Globant, the Argentina-based software development company that floated on the New York Stock Exchange in July 2014, is targeting very rapid growth. CEO Martín Migoya told the Reuters news agency that the company is aiming for 25% annual revenue growth, and hopes to double its current US$250m per annum turnover within the next four to five years. Sales last year were worth US$200m, and Migoya says he expects them to total US$249m this year. Migoya has always insisted that Globant relies on skilled and creative software specialists and a growing global network, and as such…

The border between Colombia and Venezuela has been closed on the orders of Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro, on security grounds (Maduro cited clashes between Colombian smugglers and Venezuelan security forces as the trigger for the move, which began in the state of Táchira in late August and has now been extended to the entire land border with Colombia). The measure has been accompanied, very controversially, by the expulsion and voluntary repatriation of up to 20,000 Colombian migrants eking out a living just inside the Venezuelan border, sparking strong tensions between the two countries. A direct meeting between Maduro and Colombia’s…

Both the government and the Bolsa de Valores de Lima (BVL) were taken by surprise when MSCI, one of the main publishers of global capital market indices, announced that it was considering downgrading the Peruvian stock market from “emerging” to “frontier” status. The Peruvian authorities feel very strongly that being taken out of the “emerging” club and put into the “frontier” category would be bad news for the country, despite some suggestions to the contrary. If the reclassification goes ahead, the BVL will go from being a small fish in a big pond to being a bigger fish in a…

For several months now, a corruption scandal has been simmering around the Mexican subsidiary of the Spanish civil engineering group, Obrascón Huarte Laín (OHL). The dispute revolves around a series of leaked audio recordings apparently showing that OHL was unduly favoured with toll road contracts by officials in Estado de México (Edomex), and in turn rewarded these officials in various ways. The story has now taken a new turn, with accusations and counter-accusations between OHL and a traffic monitoring company, Infraiber. At one level the case is being seen as an illustration of the sharp business practices that sometimes take…