Hey Bgrass,
I won't debate the merits of Fuse's strategy and why they chose Venezuela as their first Latin American market because I don't now the reasons why they did it.
But i do know about the country as I was born and raised in Venezuela, and while I have been living the states for the last 10 years, I still go to Venezuela about 10 times a year and the company I work for has many interests in Venezuela.
While you are right that Venezuela has a lot of poverty, it also has a lot of wealth. Not properly distributed but the wealth exists. There are many people with insane amounts of money in Venezuela, and there is a large upper middle class.
All the big companies in the world have a presence in Venezuela. Procter and Gamble's headquarters for Latin America have been in Caracas for many years, for example.
The airports are completely packed all the time. In fact, try to buy a ticket on American airlines during december in or out of Venezuela, from NY to Caracas or Miami to Caracas...or Caracas to Paris if you want... to any destination and you will se how packed the flights are. Flying from Miami to Caracas, a 3hr flight, is sometimes more expensive than traveling from Miami to Tokyo or London because of the demand. All the major airlines have multiple daily flights in and out of venezuela to anywhere in the world and they are packed all the time.
People play a lot of sports in Venezuela, baseball, soccer, cycling, running, basketball etc, all big.
Venezuela is near the top of luxury spirits consumed per capita in the world. No other country, except for Ireland, consumes more scotch per capita in the World. And it is the number one market for brands like Buchannan's 18, Royal Salute, Chivas 18 which are expensive scotches.
It is also near the top in cell phone sells per capita. It is even part of blackberry case study. There are more cell phones than people in the country. Most of them smartphones.
It is is also part of a twitter case study since it is one the countries with the highest twitter and Facebook usage rate per capita.
There are many golf country clubs, and everybody is a fan of Tiger down there.
I can go on and on with examples of why simply saying "Venezuela is just a poor developing nation" is a gross simplification.
Latin America as a whole is a big big market, and Venezuela is a very important part of the Latin American puzzle. Every big company in the world knows it...Mcdonalds, Toyota, Yum brands, Procter and Gamble, major banks, Sony, reckitt benckiser, gillette, Google, Facebook, Disney, etc you name it. Why not Fuse?
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