Forecasting in strategic international marketing. Conception for and application to the construction of large-scale pollution abatement installations

Division of labour continues to progress worldwide, particularly in the European economy, where it is an accompainment to the steady growth of transnational trade relations. In this situation forecasts attain great importance for companies facing structural decisions. This holds not only for large international concerns but also increasingly for medium-sized companies. The methodological approaches adopted by such companies are primarily aimed at reducing the risk of wrong decisions by gathering information and incorporating forecasts in their planning and decision-making processes. The present article describes various forecasting methods, exemplifying them for the area of commercial-sized building projects. Due to the great complexity of such installations and discontinuities in developments in international markets, quantitative forecasting methods and models are only of limited value here. In contrast to this, qualitative methods such as those provided by expert systems and contemporary dp tools for data collection and compression have attained great importance for the design of practiable and reliable forecasting systems. The present study thus lays have the interface between international marketing and corporate planning and decision-making processes. (orig.)