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...When BMW was looking for a place to roll out its new top-of-the-range 7 Series model, one country immediately came to mind: Russia. Demand for luxury autos has been soaring there - BMW's Russian sales have quadrupled in the past five years and were up 54% last year alone. So the German automaker threw a splashy party in Moscow on July 8, unveiling its revamped model inside a 40-ft.-high (12 m) acrylic-and-steel hourglass that it erected on Red Square itself. The show "reflects the confidence that the BMW Group has in this country...
...BMW is far from alone in viewing Russia as an El Dorado. From luxury brands to supermarket chains to machinery companies, a growing number of Western firms has discovered that this country of 141 million can be highly lucrative for those positioned to capitalize on a consumption boom fueled by massive oil and gas exports. The result has been a huge surge in foreign direct investment: last year Russia attracted $52.5 billion - four times the $12.9 billion it pulled in as recently as 2005. That puts it ahead of two of the three other BRIC countries, India and Brazil...
...Western companies are talking publicly about revising their Russian investment strategies in the wake of the war with Georgia, and Russia watchers are sharply divided over whether there will be a medium- or long-term impact on economic ties with the West. BMW, for one, is proceeding apace with building its sales network there: by the end of this year, it aims to have a dealership in 47 Russian cities with populations of more than 300,000. One of the biggest corporate-investment programs, by Italy's Enel - which has spent about $6 billion on an effort to become...
...India and Brazil. There's always been this kind of residual fear over Russia," says Roland Nash, head of research at Renaissance Capital, a Moscow-based investment bank. Still, he adds, "Eventually what will drive people back into the market is the fact that there are cheap assets here." BMW, Enel, L'Oréal and all the other foreign companies continuing to crowd into Russia wouldn't disagree...
...than 90 different fabrics in a wind tunnel to find the one with the smallest drag coefficient. It eventually settled on a nylon estane base fabric and a thin polyurethane membrane for the panels. Speedo hired ANSYS Fluent - known most recently for its work on the Formula One team BMW Sauber - which used computational fluid dynamics to measure the parts of the body with the most drag. And biomechanists used flume testing (basically a lab set up in a pool, measuring drag as a current runs over the swimmer or mannequin) to measure exactly how much time each modification shed...