Theo's Adventure Capitalists - Brazil

Theo Paphitis travels to Brazil to follow three intrepid British companies trying to succeed in one of the world’s most exciting markets.

The Brazilian economy is still expanding, but what can we Brits sell them that they haven’t already got?

Theo travels to Brazil’s business hub, Sao Paolo, to Bauru – in the heart of sugar cane country – and to the glamorous Rio De Janeiro to chart the fortunes of three British companies with very different aims and ambitions.

Creative Commons Image TongaDaMilonga via Flickr
Machado de Mello square, Bauru [Image: Tonga Da Milonga under CC-BY-NC-SA licence]

The companies

There’s Sleek Make Up, an East London company specialising in cosmetics for darker-skinned women.

Dreamaid, a web site aimed at helping the world’s poorer artists sell their wares to richer customers around the world, using Brazil as the testing ground.

A familiar name in the UK, Cadbury were eyeing the Brazilian chocolate market, one of the fastest-growing in the world. (This programme was filmed before Kraft's takeover of Cadbury.)

But there are dangers ahead for each of these companies.

In the UK Sleek relies on having its own dedicated stands, where you can try on the make up yourself. So how are they going to sell make up in a country where the supermarkets just put it in bubble-wrap and sling it on the shelves, stopping customers from having a test?

How does a global giant set about selling its Crème Eggs and Dairy Milk in a country where Kraft and Nestle already control 90% of the market, and the taste in chocolate is very different to that of the British?

And how can Dreamaid succeed in the hardest task that faces any internet start-up – to get people to visit your site in the first place?

The Brazilians are often characterised as laid-back and easy-going. But is doing business there going to be easy?

Doing business in Brazil

Brazil has a broad and sophisticated industrial base and a government continuing its programme of privatisation and deregulation. There is a growing middle class in Brazil who have real spending power and who appreciate high quality merchandise, therefore if a product or service is generally competitive in world markets it is also likely to be so in Brazil.

Read more about Brazil at UKTI, including a High Growth Market factsheet.

UKTI’s YouTube channel also features a couple of relevant videos, namely Doing Business in Brazil and Focus on Brazil and Mexico (Part 1) (Part 2).

Thinking of taking your business idea to Brazil? Before you do anything, explore our videos where Theo and experts from The Open University Business School offer advice on business overseas.

Talk to UKTI for a UK government perspective.

And visit the website of the Brazilian Embassy in London. They've got a range of expertise on hand in their commercial section.

There's also a special section of The Guardian website, Inside Brazil, offers a lot of advice for companies seeking to enter the Brazilian market.

More about the series