| McKinsey Classics | May 2021 |
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| It took more than 50 years for telephones to penetrate half of the US market and 38 for radio to attract 50 million users. Yet Facebook had six million of them within 12 months of its founding and 600 million half a decade later. In 2000, 95 percent of the Fortune Global 500 had their headquarters in developed economies. By 2025, half of the biggest companies will be based in the developing world—many in fast-growing cities you perhaps never heard of. Another transformative change involves demographics. Thirty years ago, relatively few people lived in countries where fertility rates were substantially below the replacement level. By 2013, 60 percent did. Even globalization is changing: trade among developing countries is growing much more quickly than trade involving developed ones. |
| Four powerful forces are transforming the global economy—accelerating technological change, urbanization in the developing world, aging, and a new kind of globalization. Learn about all of them in our 2015 book excerpt “The four global forces breaking all the trends” or read No Ordinary Disruption, the book itself. |
| — Roger Draper, editor, New York |
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