“If human beings are not drowned,’ asked the little mermaid, ‘Can they live forever? Do they never die as we do here in the sea?” – The Little Mermaid,a fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen.

Product focus based on strong core competencies combined with international diversification has been the success mantra, propounded by academicians and consultants alike. This strategy is adopted by many successful developed country transnational corporations such as Coco-Cola, Microsoft, Lafarge, and Pfizer, especially during the last three decades of increasing globalization. Contrary to some recent theories suggesting product (unrelated) diversification as a success mantra in the emerging markets vis-à-vis focused strategies as success mantra in the developed world, most developing country business groups adopting the focus strategy were also successful. Large number of business groups, which diversified more and more claiming synergies and other benefits found such benefits to be either illusory or over-rated, leading to erosion in shareholder wealth. The recent problems of big unrelated conglomerates in developing nations such as Daewoo in South Korea, Astra in Indonesia are but some of the examples that indicate all is not well with highly diversified unrelated conglomerates.