History
The concept of the competition emerged in 1980 in Portugal by SDG – Simuladores e Modelos de Gestão – in partnership with Expresso, a weekly newspaper. The GMC computer model was designed by Edit 515 Limited, registered in Scotland, U.K. It is updated frequently to reflect real world trading conditions and business risks, the aim being to present competitors with very realistic and complex business scenarios, with varied challenges and problems.
The Global Management Challenge is now the world's biggest strategic management competition - 20000 participants annually. More than 400,000 university students and company managers around the world participated since 1980.
Thirty-three countries currently participate in the contest: Angola, Australia, Belarus, Belgium, Bolivia, Brazil, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ghana, Greece, Hong Kong SAR (China), Hungary, India, Italy, Kazakhstan, Latvia, Macau SAR (China), Mexico, People's Republic of China, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Singapore, Slovakia, Spain, Turkey, Ukraine, United Kingdom and Venezuela.
For the 2010-2011 session, two new African countries are entering the contest: Ivory Coast, Benin, in partnership with Educarriere.net, a leading website in Ivory Coast which have been famous because it used to publish the result of many exams.
Although it was not confirmed on the Global GMC site, there should be a few new countries in 2011/2012 edition. It seems like Estonia and Lithuania joined, as well as Scotland (which is where the original simulation software was created). On the other hand Czech, Slovak and Hungarian organizers claimed that they left the competition due to disagreements with the global organizer. Hopefully the competition will be relaunched in these countries as Slovakia is the winner of 2010/2011 edition and Czech Republic was 3rd.
Each country organizes its own National competition, the model producing all material in the language of that country. The winners of the National competition meet to contest the International Semi-Finals and, if successful, go on to compete in the International Final (with results still in each of the countries' native language).
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