(Bloomberg News) Stocks of international companies that depend most on emerging markets for sales show developing nations won't be strong enough to buoy the global economy.

Goldman Sachs Group Inc.'s gauge of U.S. companies with the most developing-nation revenue fell 15 percent since April, the biggest drop since the bull market began in 2009. Avon Products Inc., which gets at least 74 percent of operating profit from emerging markets, sank 15 percent in New York last month. Siemens AG, which doubled sales from the nations in five years, lost 21 percent in Frankfurt, the most since October 2008.

During the U.S. recession from December 2007 to June 2009, the BRIC nations of Brazil, Russia, India and China became the engines of the global economy, with Chinese gross domestic product expanding 7.9 percent even as America was still contracting. While emerging countries produced about 85 percent of global economic growth since then, China, India and Brazil are slowing after they lifted interest rates to curb inflation following at least $870 billion of fiscal stimulus during the financial crisis.

"The policy driven boom of the past couple of years will not be repeated any time soon," said Stephen King, chief economist at HSBC Holdings Plc in London and author of "Losing Control: The Emerging Threats to Western Prosperity." It's "difficult to see how emerging nations can ride to the rescue once more," he said.

That's reflected in the stock market, where Avon and Siemens fell about twice as much as the MSCI World Index last month. With expansions faltering in the U.S., Europe and Japan, slowing demand in Brazil, Russia, India and China means more challenges to global growth. An index of Chinese manufacturing was at 50.9, near a 29-month low, the China Federation of Logistics and Purchasing reported today.

Some investors use an expanded BRICS grouping that includes South Africa after it was invited to join the group in December. Africa's biggest economy expanded an annualized 1.3 percent in the second quarter, its slowest pace in almost two years, data reported on Aug. 30 by the statistics office show.

Emerging economies will probably "avoid a hard landing, but they won't be able to bail out the world," said Joachim Fels, chief economist at Morgan Stanley in London. The bank cut its forecast last month for developing-nation growth next year to 6.1 percent from 6.7 percent.

Goldman Sachs's BRICs Sales index, which includes shares of Avon, Citigroup Inc., Whirlpool Corp. and 47 more companies, proved predictive four years ago, dropping 5.1 percent in the fourth quarter of 2007 even as the MSCI Emerging Markets Index rose 3.4 percent and analysts at Merrill Lynch & Co. and Morgan Stanley said developing nations would "decouple" from the U.S.

Brazil and Russia fell into recessions and growth tumbled in China and India. The BRIC gauge, whose companies rely on emerging countries for about 50 percent of sales on average, sank 57 percent in 2008, data compiled by Bloomberg show.

From the end of July through the close of New York trading on Aug. 30, the Goldman index lost 8.7 percent while the MSCI emerging gauge dropped 11 percent and the MSCI World index of advanced-country shares retreated 8.4 percent.

Demand is waning in developing countries as exports to the U.S. and Europe slow and tighter monetary policy curbs consumption at home.

U.S. data last month showed the world's largest economy grew 1 percent in the second quarter, slower than initially estimated, while German investor confidence slid to the lowest level in more than 2 1/2 years in August.

"The bulk of emerging markets are still dependent on developed-market growth, and that's not coming any time soon," said Rajiv Jain, who oversees about $15 billion at Vontobel Asset Management Inc., including the Virtus Global Opportunities Fund, which beat 99 percent of peers this year, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

Emerging-market policy makers have less room to stimulate demand after government budgets moved to a 2.7 percent deficit this year from a surplus in 2007, according to Nick Chamie, the head of emerging markets research at RBC Capital Markets in Toronto.

RBC and Morgan Stanley cut their estimates for global and emerging-country expansions last month amid a selloff in equities that wiped out almost $5 trillion of market value. The world economy has a 50 percent chance of slipping into recession, Michael Spence, a professor at New York University's Stern School of Business who won the Nobel Prize in economics in 2001, said in an Aug. 25 interview on Bloomberg Television.

Slowing economic growth will curb earnings at companies that rely most on buoyant global demand, according to Vontobel's Jain, who's avoiding industrial companies and commodity producers. He owns consumer staples stocks including ITC Ltd., the Kolkata-based cigarette maker, and Cia. de Bebidas das Americas, Brazil's largest brewer, in part because they can boost sales even as the economy slows.