Most companies assume a Latin America forecast means a generic report pulled off the shelf. It doesn’t have to. Discover what a forecast built specifically for your company’s markets, competitors, and leadership team looks like — and why it changes the conversation in the boardroom.
What goes wrong when companies build their own Latin America forecasts internally?
Anyone can buy the underlying economic data — it’s available from the IMF, the Economist Intelligence Unit, or similar sources. The real work starts where that data ends. A forecast that’s actually useful has to go further: it has to forecast the political environment, the regulatory environment as it specifically affects the company’s industry, the competitive landscape, and a range of scenarios for how shifts in the macro and political picture could change the assumptions behind market growth. Companies can absolutely build all of this in-house — there’s no rule against it.
But it rarely survives contact with internal politics. In most multinationals operating across the region, real influence sits with the country managers of the largest markets — Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, Colombia, Peru, Chile. If a country manager knows that a forecast built by someone in a Miami office will shape how the company allocates resources next year, that manager has every incentive to make sure their market gets painted in a favorable light, so their own projects get funded. Multiply that dynamic across every country manager and regional functional head with a budget request, and an internally built forecast stops being objective and starts being political.
Objectivity is the value an outside forecaster brings that no internal team can fully replicate. AMI still works closely with clients throughout the process — pulling in their past market studies, competitive analysis, their own sales figures, and their own estimated market share to sharpen accuracy. The more a company can feed into that process, the more accurate the forecast becomes. But AMI, not the client, holds final say on how the forecast is built, what data it relies on, and what direction it ultimately points — which is exactly the guarantee of objectivity that gets lost when a forecast is built entirely in-house.
What else does bringing in AMI solve that companies can’t easily solve on their own?
Experience. AMI’s team runs roughly 20 of these forecasts a year, which means the process is tested, thorough, and accounts for every ingredient a rigorous forecast needs — the kind of learning curve that only comes from repetition. Some companies know how to build a forecast at that level of rigor. Very few actually do it well, because the person handed the assignment internally is often junior, and is frequently doing this for the very first time.
That inexperience is expensive precisely because of what’s riding on the output: a forecast built this way typically feeds directly into how a company allocates a year’s worth of resources across an entire region. Getting the underlying assumptions wrong — or missing a key ingredient because nobody on the internal team knew to look for it — doesn’t just produce a weak document. It produces a weak plan.
Forecasts and outlooks are everywhere at year-end. What actually makes AMI’s different?
Every year-end, all kinds of organizations put out forecasts and outlooks — Google it, or ask an answer engine, and dozens surface immediately. Most of them trace back to the same handful of sources: Washington-based IMF data, London’s Economist Intelligence Unit, Euromonitor, or Chicago research shops. That data isn’t always tuned to what’s actually happening in a specific local market.
AMI has people in the region, which means the read on political change is sharper — not just whether something happened, but whether it actually matters to a given industry, and how much. That local sensitivity helps. But the more important difference is scope: a real forecast doesn’t stop at economics and politics. It has to account for industry dynamics, the regulatory environment as it applies to that specific business, and the competitive landscape. That’s where most generic forecasting providers stop, and where AMI’s work begins.
How does AMI bring strategic thinking into a forecast, rather than just running the numbers?
One example: a global manufacturer of garbage truck bodies and hydraulic compression systems — not the whole truck, but the large metal container and compactor technology attached to it — came to AMI convinced that Argentina was its strongest Latin America market and that Brazil was soft. Argentina had pegged its currency to the dollar for several years, giving it the purchasing power to finally replace a fleet that had aged badly during an earlier stretch of hyperinflation, when the country simply couldn’t afford to import capital goods. Once the peg gave them currency strength, Argentina bought garbage trucks in mass for five or six years straight, becoming one of the hottest markets in the world for the product.
AMI’s analysis started from what actually drives that business, which comes down to three things: how much of the fleet actually needs replacing, given that equipment has a finite lifespan; where each market sits in its municipal election cycle, since local governments — nearly everywhere in Latin America — tend to drain their coffers early in a term, rebuild them through the middle years, and then make big, visible capital purchases like new garbage trucks near the end of the cycle, once campaign promises need to be delivered on for voters; and how strong the local currency is, since that determines whether the purchase is even affordable.
By that logic, Argentina had already bought what it needed — the fleet was young again, so there was little pressure to replace it even with money available — while Brazil’s older, aging fleet and a currency that was gradually strengthening pointed toward a coming replacement cycle. AMI forecast almost no further sales in Argentina and a meaningful rise in Brazil over the following five years. The client’s own sales team thought the call was crazy; the marketing team, which had worked in emerging markets elsewhere and recognized the same municipal spending pattern, understood the logic. The forecast turned out to be exactly right — reinforced further when Argentina’s currency peg eventually broke down in its own financial crisis, by which point the market had already bought all the trucks it needed anyway.
What’s the value of customizing a forecast rather than using a standard template?
The starting premise is that the past doesn’t just repeat itself. Look at most published multi-year Latin America forecasts and, beyond about two years out, they default to a straight line: a modest growth rate in year three, then the same number extended indefinitely. Company-built forecasts tend to do the same thing — average the last ten years of growth, tweak it slightly, and project it forward.
That approach misses the cyclical nature of Latin American economies almost entirely. It misses shifts in the competitive landscape. It misses changing consumer tastes. Spend enough time and thought on a forecast and those cycles become visible; skip that work, and the forecast is likely wrong before it’s even finished. AMI builds forecasts around economic cycles, political cycles, and competitive dynamics specific to the client’s market — which is what makes the output meaningfully more accurate than an average dressed up as a projection.
Does that include forecasting demand for a specific new product or service launch?
Yes, though it’s a much harder problem for a genuinely new concept than for an extension of something that already exists. Market research can inform how to position a product, how to price it, which features to include or exclude, and which channels to pursue. When a product is an update to something already on the market, that research can measure directly how consumers react to the new features compared to the old version — which makes adoption far easier to predict.
An entirely new concept is a different problem. There’s no existing consumer behavior to benchmark against, so predicting adoption is inherently difficult no matter how good the underlying research is. AMI still builds a demand-forecast component into these engagements wherever a launch is on the table — it’s just built with that added layer of uncertainty priced in and clearly flagged, rather than papered over.
How do these forecasts typically fit into a company’s planning session or client conference?
Two contexts come up most often. The first is internal planning: often a multi-day meeting in Miami bringing together country managers and C-suite leadership from across Latin America to lay out plans for the year ahead. AMI is typically brought in early in that process to provide an objective view of the market, which matters because the room is already full of competing internal politics — one country manager wants their projects funded, another wants the same, the head of regional marketing has their own priorities, and there’s rarely enough budget for all of it. AMI’s forecast provides an objective roadmap of which markets, product areas, or channels are actually positioned to grow faster than others, which gives decision-makers real political cover: it’s a lot easier to tell a colleague their project has to wait a year when an outside, credible source says the underlying market is soft.
The second context is the client-facing conference — common in B2B industries, where a company’s own customers (banks, trucking companies, manufacturers, whoever the client base happens to be) are brought together for a day of what’s typically called thought-leadership marketing. That day is, functionally, a full day of advertising: the host company introduces new products and reminds its customers why they’re worth buying. To make that worth attending, companies will point to the fact that they’ve brought in AMI to deliver a forecast and analyze the competition. Because of that role, this version of the forecast comes with more presentation polish — it has to hold a room for a full day — while still delivering substance: real analysis of competition, regulation, and, increasingly, questions clients are already asking about tariffs, trade policy, and shifting U.S.-China dynamics in the region. Audiences in smaller markets, in particular, tend to respond well to that level of forecasting, since they’re less often exposed to it — which reflects well on the company that brought AMI in to present it.
Whether the audience is a company’s own leadership or its most important clients, a Latin America forecast is only as useful as the objectivity and rigor behind it. AMI has built thousands of Latin America market studies across payments, mining, energy, logistics, and beyond — giving every forecast a foundation that internal teams and off-the-shelf data can’t replicate.
Learn more about AMI’s Latin America Forecast Presentations for companies, explore AMI’s full range of research and advisory services, or see why global companies rely on AMI — including AMI’s current clients — for objective, on-the-ground Latin America intelligence.
