With Burger King planning to relocate there after completing its buy of coffee-and-donut chain Tim Hortons for about $11.4bn, Canada is emerging as the latest tax haven for U.S. firms fleeing a high tax code at home.
The United States has the highest corporate income tax rate among the 34 industrialized nations of the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development, the world trade group, says a new paper from the Tax Foundation.
Chief financial officers of corporations that have already set up captive insurance companies or are thinking about setting one up should ponder the benefits of self-insuring cyber perils and supply chain business-interruption risks via a captive to supplement commercial insurance coverage.
Although U.S. companies still trail their European counterparts in using the Chinese currency renminbi for cross-border deals, the frequency has nearly doubled in the past year, according to a recent HSBC study, as reported by the publication Treasury & Risk.
Small business vendors that frequently have to chase down larger clients to get paid might have reason to rejoice. According to a story in The Wall Street Journal, the White House has launched an initiative that will either speed payments to small suppliers or help them access "lower-cost capital."
While recent innovations in the software sector have significantly boosted capabilities for most software products, free open-source software solutions have made an even bigger splash. More than half of all data mining tasks are now conducted using open-source software, displacing the purchase of proprietary software.
Whereas business interruption insurance covers lost profits and continuing expenses as a result of physical damage to a policyholder's own facilities, contingent business interruption insurance covers such losses stemming from damage to the premises of a supplier or customer. Large companies typically have both types of insurance as part of their property insurance policies; smaller companies may not have the contingent business interruption extension.
Private companies, expecting revenue growth to soar far past that of gross domestic product (GDP), are in a hiring mode not seen since pre-recession days.
While various GDP forecasts for the United States call for 2014 growth of less than 3 percent, the average predicted revenue gain for the next 12 months, among 213 private companies surveyed by PricewaterhouseCoopers between January and April, was 8.5 percent.
For every company that thrives in a foreign market, probably five companies stumble. The complexities of entering a foreign market can result in many strategic mistakes and missteps. Even businesses that eventually "win" in a geographic region can teeter on the edge for years.
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