You are Mette Kjær Andersen, head of strategy for Latin America at Nordic Home Essentials, working from Mexico City. The board wants a recommendation on entering Colombia at its June meeting, sixty days away, built one front at a time. The political front comes first, and tonight you have to decide how hard the entry plan will lean in on it.
The situation
It is Wednesday, 15 April 2026. Nordic Home Essentials, based in Copenhagen since 1962, makes household cleaning, personal care and packaged food products and operates in 38 countries; in Latin America, in Mexico, Brazil, Chile and Peru. Colombia has been on its list since 2022: 52 million people, the region's fourth-largest economy, a young and increasingly urban population. Every regional plan has included it, and every plan has deferred it.
The board has approved a US$5 million pre-entry fund and wants the case built country-first, across six fronts in a fixed order: political, economic, social, technological, environmental and legal. On each one you will rate its attractiveness and its risk, choose the plan's stance and commit money, up to US$2 million per front. Whatever you spend on one is no longer available for the next.
The political file does not point one way. Colombia has strengthened its democratic institutions over two decades, actively promotes foreign investment and has free trade agreements with the United States, the European Union and its Pacific Alliance partners. But regulation can change with each administration, regional governance is uneven and the country ranks 87th in the global corruption perception index.
Lars Holm, the regional finance director, wants the fund concentrated where the risk is highest. Natalia Pineda, the Bogotá lawyer retained by the group, argues that every front will need some of it before the lawyers sign off. The working template sets every rating at 5 out of 10 and pencils in US$500,000 per front. At 18:40, Holm's message arrives: "Political first. Remember the board will read the peso before it reads anything else."