organizational functions for your venture

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On the demand side, exporters and strategic planners focusing on apparel and clothing accessories in Ecuador face a number of questions.

Research the questions:

Which countries are supplying apparel and clothing accessories to Ecuador? How important is Ecuador compared to others in terms of the entire global and regional market? How much do the imports of apparel and clothing accessories vary from one country of origin to another in Ecuador? On the supply side, Ecuador also exports apparel and clothing accessories. Which countries receive the most exports from Ecuador? How are these exports concentrated across buyers? What is the value of these exports and which countries are the largest buyers?

With the globalization of this market, managers can no longer be contented with a local view. Nor can managers be contented with out-of-date statistics which appear several years after the fact. Icon Group has developed a proprietary methodology, based on macroeconomic and trade models, to estimate the market for apparel and clothing accessories for those countries serving Ecuador via exports, or supplying from Ecuador via imports. It does so for the current year based on a variety of key historical indicators and econometric models.

The total level of imports and exports on a worldwide basis, and those for Ecuador in particular, is estimated using a model which aggregates across over 150 key country markets and projects these to the current year. From there, each country represents a percent of the world market. This market is served from a number of competitive countries of origin. Based on both demand- and supply-side dynamics, market shares by country of origin are then calculated across each country market destination. These shares lead to a volume of import and export values for each country and are aggregated to regional and world totals. In doing so, we are able to obtain maximum likelihood estimates of both the value of each market and the share that Ecuador is likely to receive this year. From these figures, rankings are calculated to allow managers to prioritize Ecuador compared to other major country markets. In this way, all the figures provided in this report are forecasts that can be combined with internal information sources for strategic planning purposes.

A "major" market is defined as a country where Ecuador represents a substantially large share of either imports or exports. For each major country exporting to Ecuador, one can thus observe how important Ecuador is to that exporting country compared to other countries of the world. Chapter 4 does the same, but for exports of apparel and clothing accessories ...