FT piece that leads with recent acquisitions highlighted here previously (Geely buys Volvo, Bharti Airtel buys Zain's Africa telecom biz). New Core corps are described, predictably enough, as "climbing up the value chain," meaning offering higher-end product and services or moving off the low-cost end of the spectrum.
We saw Germany do this after WWII, then Japan, then Korea, then the tigers, and now India and China and Brazil. The big difference now is the speed of the climb. These new corp giants are described as moving with far less caution than their Japanese predecessors did, for example--especially when it comes to aggressively acquiring Western companies and joint ventures with Western firms. And when state-owned companies are involved, the political pushback from the West will only grow--as it should.
The quote that caught my eye:
Securing global standards throughout an emerging markets-based organization is a difficult task.
Gist: when you're rising, you make up a lot of new rules as you go, typically transgressing more than a few established ones--hence the sense among your competitors that you're shaking things up.