Brazil: After the carnival - FT.com

Brazil: After the carnival - FT.com: "Chen Zhizhao, the newest addition to Brazil’s champion football club, Corinthians, already seems at home at the team’s training ground on the edge of São Paulo.
Recruited this year from a club in Guangzhou, southern China, the young footballer has quickly started speaking some Portuguese."

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“Everything is good, the food and the air, the weather is good here,” he says.

Although the club claims he was recruited purely for his talent, most suspect the real role of Mr Chen, the first Chinese player to join a major Brazilian team, is to lift the club’s profile in China so that it can sell its distinctive black-and-white team merchandise there.

Corinthians may not realise it but, through its canny use of an area in which Brazil has a natural competitive edge – football – to tap the Chinese market, the club in its own small way is providing a pointer for a country whose economy suddenly seems to have lost direction.

Elsewhere, exporting success from such kinds of innovation has proved elusive. Over the past decade, Brazil has largely relied on exports of commodities such as soy and iron ore to fuel spectacular economic growth, which peaked at 7.5 per cent in 2010.

But this growth has slowed to a crawl and the world’s second-largest emerging market is expected to expand only 2 per cent this year. Much of its industry, in spite of a seemingly endless series of stimulus measures, has become globally uncompetitive. Only the consumer seems to be holding the fort but even here, there are signs of fatigue.

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