Portuguese is the official language of Portugal and Brazil. With approximately 180 million native speakers, it is also the second most widely spoken Romance language, after Spanish.

The Portuguese government is focusing on boosting exports and implementing labour market reforms to try to raise GDP growth and increase Portugal’s competitiveness. According to the Encyclopedia of the Nations, incentives to attract foreign direct investment will receive more attention, and Portugal may attract some new additional investment from its close links with Spain and Latin America. Due to the limited size of the domestic capital markets, more medium-sized businesses will increasingly seek funding in the international markets.

The newspaper The Brazil Business has identified six business trends in Brazil in 2011:

  1. Credit is easily available, also unsecured credit to the lower classes.
  2. Politicians are turning left, and the conditions for businesses are suffering. The new president, Dilma Roussef, increased the taxes on foreign investor’s fixed-income purchases.
  3. Brazilians are turning to their mobile phones and mobile broadband in huge numbers.
  4. In April 2011, Facebook surpassed Orkut as the leading social network in Brazil. Over the last few years, Facebook has been quickly catching up on Orkut as the market leader in Brazil.
  5. A couple of years ago, Brazil got the first Apple certified reseller in A2You, and the sale of Apple products started to increase.
  6. Analysts and businessmen alike started to talk about the Brazilian bubble, a situation which may happen because of the international attention and the money being injected into the economy.