I have published the BECH Index for 2022, which includes data for the years 2017 to 2023. The whitepaper estimates the relative demand capacity for B2B information technology and related services worldwide.

Against the backdrop of the pandemic and Russia’s war on Ukraine, I have added a completely new text section. How the new world order, the disruption of global supply chains and the changes in the economy will affect small and medium-sized B2B information technology companies’ opportunities for international expansion and global growth is hard to predict.

On the positive side, the pandemic has increased the threshold for what you can sell to customers without meeting them face-to-face. Provided you have a competitive offering. This opportunity also applies to cross-border activities. In more and more situations, you can sell your software or solutions to customers in other countries without having a local business infrastructure.

There are markets where you will avoid investing in the short term because it’s ethically troublesome and too risky.

The whitepaper reviews the various go-to-market approaches and urges the reader to carefully consider the virtual and remote options that reduce the investment requirements and the risk considerably. When this approach is not possible, then the whitepaper recommends a way to identify and prioritise the markets where you should invest in local infrastructure.

I have moved the UK out of the EU for the whitepaper. For comparison reasons, this has been done for all years.

The objective of this annual whitepaper, to stack ranking countries according to their economic capacity, was initially meant to help software executives in their search for the best possible global expansion opportunities.

Although economic capacity was only meant as a simple proxy for assessing the size of a market, the pretext was that with the investments needed for setting up a revenue generation infrastructure, there was always a minimum requirement for critical mass.

International expansion required localising and translating products and documentation and establishing a country-specific revenue generation capacity.

In the current economic and political environment, making such investment decisions has become even more difficult. Fortunately, the same conditions plus the pandemic aftermath have given us new options, which I describe in the whitepaper.