The Leave campaign’s victory, with a margin of 3.8 percentage points, has likely ushered in a protracted phase of uncertainty for the UK, EU, and global economies. A systemic shock cutting across industries and borders, Brexit poses significant strategic challenges for business leaders as they navigate the fallout. Judging by our interactions with CEOs around the world to date, some of their burning questions are:
What are the elements of uncertainty created by Brexit?
How can leaders develop a specific view of the industry- and firm-level implications?
What are the first-response imperatives for corporate leaders?
What structural changes to the business environment are triggered by Brexit, and how do we adapt to them?
This is how we recommend CEOs approach these difficult questions:
Identify the Sources of Uncertainty
The uncertainties that come with Brexit can be ordered into four categories. While the overall directional impact is generally clear, it’s the magnitude, duration, and differential that are more critical to determine.
Political Process. There are significant drivers of uncertainty domestically and abroad. At home, the UK faces dissolution pressures if Scotland seeks to salvage its EU membership, while the EU has every incentive to make Brexit a painful experience to deter other defectors, making the outcome of negotiations difficult to predict. These unknowns have the potential to influence the evolution of the financial, institutional, and real economies.
Financial Economy. The directional impact on key prices was widely predicted—and strong corrections to the pound (–11% versus
the dollar) and to equities (–13.6% FTSE250) were indeed recorded in the first two sessions after the vote. The Bank of England will likely lower policy rates, or even adopt negative interest rates. What drives uncertainty are the magnitude and duration of these corrections; as prices guide resource allocation, their volatility and uncertainty interfere with planning and investment decisions.
Trade Regime. The reconstruction challenge for the UK’s trade regime is clear. The EU represents 47% of UK exports, facilitates an additional 13% through non-EU trade deals, and currently negotiates with countries worth an additional 21% of UK exports. While the UK would need only eight bilateral trade agreements to cover 80% of its current exports, there is a long tail of 18 additional countries worth more than $1 billion in UK exports and an additional 132 countries to cover all existing exports. Both internal and external factors drive uncertainty about the duration and outcome of the reconstruction challenge—for example, the UK’s ability to negotiate agreements, having outsourced this task to Brussels for 40 years, or trade partners’ willingness to engage with Britain in a constructive and timely manner.
Real Economy. The transmission mechanism to the real economy is primarily via delayed or canceled investment decisions or the anticipatory redeployment of employment or production assets. Here, too, the directional impact has been analyzed credibly, with estimates ranging from 3% to 9% of GDP loss. Here it is the speed, depth, and duration of these effects—on demand, consumption, and employment across industries—that drive uncertainty.
Determine the Specific Industry- and Firm-Level Implications Industries and individual companies vary widely in terms of the impact on the uncertainties outlined above, due to their differential dependence on UK and EU production, demand and trade, global trade, regulation, and integration into EU structures (such as R&D subsidies and EU norms and standards). Therefore each company needs to carry out (or take to the next
level) its own specific impact analysis.
It is impossible to forecast precise impact with confidence, given that exit terms, timing, and knock-on implications are all uncertain. A scenario-based approach to planning, modeling, and preparing for multiple outcomes is therefore recommended.
This can be done in four steps:
More: www.hbr.org.
Authors:
Martin Reeves is a senior partner and managing director in the New York office of The Boston Consulting Group, the director of the BCG Henderson Institute, and a coauthor of Your Strategy Needs a Strategy, Harvard Business Review Press, 2015.
Philipp Carlsson-Szlezak is the firm’s chief economist and head of BCG’s Center for Macroeconomics.