What Investors Miss When They Look at Emerging Markets

I have spent most of the last three decades building companies in places where conditions changed faster than plans could adapt. Currency devaluations that wiped out a year of planning overnight. Sanctions that rewrote my supplier contracts without warning. A pandemic that closed borders while I was running daily deliveries to tens of thousands of retail points across Central Asia. Through it all, I kept noticing the same thing about the advice, the products, and the capital that arrived from the West.

It was built for a world I did not live in.

The consultants in the nineties made the same mistake

When the Soviet Union collapsed, consultants flew in to teach us capitalism and democracy. Bright people, good intentions, strong frameworks. Most of it failed to take. The ideas were logically valid in themselves, but the surrounding society was not prepared to adopt them.

There was no stable tax code that had stood for fifty years, no institutional memory, no assumption that the rules tomorrow would resemble the rules today. You cannot transplant the conclusions of a system without the conditions that produced them.Every product carries its place of origin inside it without anyone noticing. Software designed in London or San Francisco quietly expects a functioning banking system, documents that can be verified, prices that remain steady, and suppliers who honor contracts. Where I work, none of that can be taken for granted, so a product shaped for one reality lands in another and comes apart, usually at the exact point where it trusted something to hold. Investment judgment is made the same way. A diligence checklist, a benchmark, and a definition of traction are also products of the place that wrote it, and they fail in the same quiet way when they cross a border.

What kept me alive was not in any textbook 

The university did not prepare me for any of this. What carried me was the ability to read a room, to move quickly when conditions shifted, to keep operating when the formal system around me stopped cooperating. The companies that work in my part of the world have that same quality built into them. When the power cuts or the network drops, they keep working. That is normal where I operate, so the systems have to handle it. I learned this firsthand, running supply chains and watching imported systems break at the first point where they relied on something being reliable.

When institutions are weak, reputation does the work

In places where the official institutions are weak, business runs on relationships and reputation. This is not nostalgia for a handshake culture. It is a practical response to the fact that paperwork is often not available. The IMF estimates that the informal economy accounts for roughly a third of output in many developing markets, against about 15 percent in advanced economies. When that much activity never appears in official records, a product or an investor that demands a verifiable salary or a clean credit history has very little to read. 

The activity itself has not disappeared. It has moved into channels the formal system was never built to see, and technology is beginning to make those channels legible. A shop owner who settles with her suppliers through a messaging app leaves a transaction history. Mobile top-ups have a frequency and a size. Reorders have a rhythm, remittances arrive on a schedule, utility payments either happen or they do not. A trader who has paid the same wholesaler every Tuesday for six years is a better risk than many salaried employees, and for the first time, there are systems capable of seeing it. The companies succeeding in these markets are the ones reading those signals, treating relationships as data rather than noise.

I know how much information lives in that layer because my own career has run on it. Bankers once offered me a distribution company carrying $200 million in debt, with 5,000 employees, because they knew my track record with distressed assets from years of working alongside them. On paper, the company was a liability nobody wanted, and on paper, I had no business taking it. The transaction was based on that history, and it ended with the debts cleared and the suppliers paid.

The round is where the work starts

I meet a lot of founders now, in London, in Dubai, across the region. Many of them confuse a funding round with an accomplishment. Raising money means investors believe in your idea enough to bet on it. It does not mean you have built a business that works. I have watched people rise impressively, only to discover there was nothing underneath once the money ran out. In markets like mine, the companies that survive are the ones forged under pressure that would never show up in a polished pitch deck. That durability is hard to fake and easy to underprice.

The rest of the world is catching up to this 

I now spend much of my time as an early investor in AI and digital companies, with one eye always on the regions I came up in. The world is becoming less predictable, not more. Supply shocks, currency swings, governments reversing decisions overnight, power and internet you cannot count on: all of it is reaching countries that assumed they were done with these problems.

That changes where the strongest companies will come from. A team that built something to keep working when the electricity fails, when banks have no record of half their customers, and when the currency can lose a third of its value in a month has already solved harder problems than a team that assumed none of that would happen. When conditions get tougher elsewhere, the first team adjusts and the second one stalls. Investors who only know how to read a Silicon Valley pitch will keep walking past these companies, because their strength does not show up in the numbers those investors were trained to check.

So learn to read the other numbers. Learn to see the resilience a founder develops when there is no other way to survive, and the information that lives in places a credit bureau will never index. I built through collapse because I had no choice. The founders doing the same thing right now, in markets where nothing can be taken for granted, are worth your attention before the rest of the world works out why.

About the author: Kairat Mamiev — tech founder of Central Asia's leading logistics-tech platform, and an active early-stage investor in AI and next-generation digital products. Over three decades, he built a vertically integrated digital infrastructure that today processes the supply chain operations underpinning ~75% of Central Asia's consumer economy — and is now extending that technology thesis into the regional AI ecosystem as a founder-investor.