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Business News Group (BNG) is a publishing company based in Monterrey, northern Mexico. The company is engaged in several activities, chief among them the publication of the weekly business newspaper Biznews, custom publishing, plus outsourced design and content services.
BNG's flagship product is Biznews, published since 1999 and distributed throughout the six northern Mexican states that share the border with the USA (Baja California, Sonora, Chihuahua, Coahuila, Nuevo León and Tamaulipas), as well as subscribers in Mexico City and in other states, plus distribution in the cities of the southwest USA located close to the international border. Biznews is published in Spanish, although its website often includes special sections produced in English. Biznews is Mexico's only regional business publication, and is focused on issues involving Mexico's northern states and the border region. This region is Mexico's economic powerhouse: the six Mexican border states represent just 17% of Mexico's population yet produce almost 25% of the nation's GDP. [1]
The newspaper's founding partners in 1999 were Luke Betts and Carlos Chávez. Biznews was operated until 2005 by the company Business Communications Group, at which time the original partners, Betts and Chávez, decided to split the company's assets. Ownership and operation of Biznews was taken over by Monterrey-based company Business News Group, owned by Betts. The remainder of the original company's operations (principally commercial representation of national media), was taken over by Chavez's new company Commercial Media Bizcom, which is based in Mexico City and is the commercial representative for Biznews in the Mexican capital.
Among its awards, Biznews won the 2000 "Media of the Year" award designated by Mexico's advertising and marketing magazine NEO.
In November 2009, BNG signed an agreement with ImpreMedia, the largest Spanish language print and online publisher in the US, to design, format and produce advertisements and editorial pages for impreMedia's printed publications. [2] This was the most far-reaching outsourcing agreement ever in the US Spanish-language newspaper market, and marked BNG's incursion into the growing international market of outsourced design and editorial services. ImpreMedia had previously entered into an agreement with Mexico City-based LatinWeb to outsource all the back-end and support work of its digital products. The BNG/ImpreMedia agreement was dubbed a "NAFTA classic" in the influential column "Fitz and Jen" in the industry magazine Editor and Publisher, referring to the fact that a US company run by a Canadian newspaper veteran (then ImpreMedia CEO John Paton) that serves a primarily Mexican audience in the United States was outsourcing its design work to a company in Mexico also run by a Canadian newspaper veteran (BNG president Luke Betts). [3] The agreement covers ImpreMedia's daily newspapers La Opinión of Los Angeles and El Diario of New York, plus the weeklies El Mensajero (San Francisco), Rumbo (Houston), La Raza (Chicago) and La Prensa (Orlando).
BNG publishes specialized products as well, such as an annual magazine for Mexico's Tourism Board, used to promote the country's congress and convention industry. In 2009 the magazine went under the title of Let's Meet in Mexico, and for 2010 was named Mexico Where Worlds Meet. Other federal government clients include ProMexico, the country's trade and investment promotion agency, for which BNG has produced promotional texts in English and Spanish. The company also works with a variety of state-level tourism and economic development ministries. Private sector clients include the national hotel chain Camino Real and Centro Banamex, Mexico City's largest convention center.
The economy of Mexico is a developing mixed-market economy. It is the 12th largest in the world in nominal GDP terms and by purchasing power parity according to the International Monetary Fund. Since the 1994 crisis, administrations have improved the country's macroeconomic fundamentals. Mexico was not significantly influenced by the 2002 South American crisis, and maintained positive, although low, rates of growth after a brief period of stagnation in 2001. However, Mexico was one of the Latin American nations most affected by the 2008 recession with its gross domestic product contracting by more than 6% in that year.
The North American Free Trade Agreement was an agreement signed by Canada, Mexico, and the United States that created a trilateral trade bloc in North America. The agreement came into force on January 1, 1994, and superseded the 1988 Canada–United States Free Trade Agreement between the United States and Canada. The NAFTA trade bloc formed one of the largest trade blocs in the world by gross domestic product.
Monterrey is the capital and largest city of the northeastern state of Nuevo León, Mexico, and the second largest city in Mexico behind Mexico City. Located at the foothills of the Sierra Madre Oriental, the city is anchor to the Monterrey metropolitan area, the second-largest in Mexico with an estimated population of 5,341,171 people as of 2020 and the second most productive metropolitan area in Mexico with a GDP (PPP) of US$140 billion in 2015. According to the 2020 census, the city itself has a population of 1,142,194.
A maquiladora, or maquila, is a word that refers to factories that are largely duty free and tariff-free. These factories take raw materials and assemble, manufacture, or process them and export the finished product. These factories and systems are present throughout Latin America, including Mexico, Paraguay, Nicaragua, and El Salvador. Maquiladoras date back to 1964, when the Mexican government introduced the Programa de Industrialización Fronteriza. Specific programs and laws have made Mexico's maquila industry grow rapidly.
Outsourcing is an agreement in which one company hires another company to be responsible for a planned or existing activity which otherwise is or could be carried out internally, i.e. in-house, and sometimes involves transferring employees and assets from one firm to another. The term outsourcing, which came from the phrase outside resourcing, originated no later than 1981. The concept, which The Economist says has "made its presence felt since the time of the Second World War", often involves the contracting out of a business process, operational, and/or non-core functions, such as manufacturing, facility management, call center/call center support.
CEMEX S.A.B. de C.V., known as Cemex, is a Mexican multinational building materials company headquartered in San Pedro, near Monterrey, Nuevo León, Mexico. It manufactures and distributes cement, ready-mix concrete and aggregates in more than 50 countries. In 2020 it was ranked as the 5th largest cement company in the world, at 87.09 million tonnes.
Ricardo Legorreta Vilchis was a Mexican architect. He was a prolific designer of private houses, public buildings and master plans in Mexico, the United States and some other countries.
La Opinión is a Spanish-language daily newspaper and website based in Los Angeles, California. It is the largest Spanish-language newspaper in the United States and the second-most read newspaper in Los Angeles. It is published by ImpreMedia, LLC.
El Diario Nueva York is the largest and the oldest Spanish-language daily newspaper in the United States. Published by ImpreMedia, the paper covers local, national and international news with an emphasis on Latin America, as well as human-interest stories, politics, business and technology, health, entertainment, and sports. El Diario Nueva York currently has 294,769 daily readers and 676,570 unique readers each week. Online, it reaches over 5 million users monthly, and it has more than 800,000 followers in social networks.
The Hong Kong Tourism Board (HKTB) is a Government-subvented body founded in 2001. The Board replaced the Hong Kong Tourist Association (HKTA) established in 1957. It has 15 branch offices and representative offices in 6 markets around the world, and its primary mission is to maximize the social and economic contribution that tourism makes to the community of Hong Kong, and consolidate the city's position as a desired destination. HKTA works with the Government, travel industry and other partners to market and promote Hong Kong worldwide, improving the range and quality of visitor facilities and tourism service standards, and enhancing the experiences of visitors.
Univision Music Group was a Latin music company in the United States. Founded in April 2001 by Univision Communications, the Univision Music Group included three record labels: Univision Records, Fonovisa Records and Disa Records. In June 2001, Univision Music acquired a 50% interest in Mexico-based Disa Records, the second largest independent Spanish language record label in the world, and Mexico's leading independent label. More recently in April 2002, Univision acquired Fonovisa, the largest Latin independent label specializing in Regional Mexican music.
Softtek is a Mexico-based information technology company, operating in North America, Latin America, Europe and Asia. Headquartered in Monterrey, Mexico, the company has 15,000 associates in Mexico and abroad and is the largest private IT vendor in Latin America. The company offers application software development, testing, security and support; business process outsourcing (BPO); and IT infrastructure management, security and support to more than 400 corporations in more than 20 countries. It also acts as a value added reseller (VAR) for SAP, Microsoft, Blue Yonder, AWS and other software products. The company has trademarked the term "nearshoring" to describe the provision of outsourced services to customers in other countries that are in proximity.
Grupo Multimedios is a Mexican media conglomerate with holdings in broadcast television, radio, publishing and entertainment.
Outsourcing of animation has become widespread. Starting in the mid-1960s, the animation for many low-budget American animated productions has been done by animation studios in foreign countries such as Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Canada, Australia, the Philippines, India, and Hungary. This is done to lower the cost of animation production.
Alberto Bustani Adem is a Mexican academic and entrepreneur of Lebanese descent (Boustani). His grandparents emigrated from Lebanon at the beginning of the 20th century, in the second period of Lebanese immigration to Mexico, and dedicated to commerce in hardware and the workwear clothing industry. On his mother's side, a family of notable scholars, mathematicians José Adem, es:Julián Adem, Alejandro Adem, Luis Casian Adem, physicist Esbaide Adem and cardiologist Abdo Bisteni Adem.
The relations between Canada and Mexico have evolved over time. Historic ties between the two nations were dormant, but since the 1990s relations between Canada and Mexico have positively developed, as both countries brokered the NAFTA. They were on different sides of the Cold War Spectrum.
Italy–Mexico relations are the bilateral relations between Italy and Mexico. Both nations are members of the G20, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and the United Nations.
Roberto Javier Mora García was a Mexican journalist and editorial director of El Mañana, a newspaper based in Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas, Mexico. He worked for a number of media outlets in Mexico, including the El Norte and El Diario de Monterrey, prior to his assassination.
María Isabel Studer Noguez is Director of Alianza University of California-Mexico. She was Director for Strategic Initiatives for Latin America and Executive Director for Mexico and Northern Central America of The Nature Conservancy. She was Director General for International Economic Cooperation at the Mexican Agency for International Cooperation, where she launched the Partnership for Sustainability with the aim of engaging the private sector in developing public-private projects around the 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda. For almost a decade, she was a professor and researcher in international relations at the Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Education, principally working as the director of the Instituto Global para la Sostenibilidad (IGS), formerly the Centro de Diálogo y Análysis sobre América del Norte (CEDAN). She began her academic career working in international relations and has held positions in both Mexico and the United States teaching, researching, advising and writing on topics related to international relations, especially in North America, business and environmental issues. Her publications include books, scholarly articles as well as articles and columns for various media.
Blanca Avelina Treviño de Vega is president and executive director of Softtek, a Mexican information and communication technologies company, the largest independent service provider in Latin America.