#HealthTech is going to be bigger than #social, #ecommerce and #AI combined.
To ensure your #datavisualizations have as big an #impact, contact me at #Furthr.
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Last month, Amazon opened its Luxury Stores as a separate space on its mobile app, available “by invitation” to US subscribers to its Prime loyalty scheme.
Instead of its usual utilitarian look, the app looks snazzy, with a gold logo against a cream-coloured background.
It was launched with an ad featuring British actress Cara Delevingne.
But will Amazon’s foray into luxury work?
Luxury E-commerce has momentum: by 2025, consultancy Bain & Company estimates that roughly one-third of luxury’s annual sales will be made online, up from 12 per cent of total sales of €281bn in 2019.
The shift is being driven by millennials and customers in China — that’s the world’s most advanced e-commerce market and the world’s fastest-growing market for luxury goods.
Amazon may be betting that it can replicate the success that Alibaba’s Tmall has had in China. Initially, luxury brands mistrusted Alibaba as down-market and rife with counterfeits. But once it moved to a concession model with a separate safe space for luxury brands, brands were won over. They now see Tmall as a key online gateway to Chinese customers.
Amazon’s Luxury Store is entering a crowded field of established companies such as Farfetch, Yoox Net-a-Porter, MatchesFashion and MyTheresa.
Such sites have supplanted the roles once played by department stores and fashion magazines —discovering new designers, tracking what is in style, and giving inspiration about what to wear.
But they all suffer from a problem. Despite growing user bases, few of them are profitable.
One leading e-tailer, Far Fetch enjoys fast growing sales, but net income is dropping.
And this is where Amazon may slowly suffocate its competitors. The world’s biggest store – Amazon has 150m global prime members – has infinite access to cheap capital without the driving need to turn a profit. That means they can consistently undercut all competition, driving them out of business.
In truth, the only thing that can stop Amazon is government regulation.
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A supermarket sustainability ratings system is being considered by Behavioural Insights, a government backed team that use behavioural economics to influence public behaviour.
It would give food retailers such as Sainsbury’s or Lidl – a clear overall sustainability score so consumers would only need to make one sustainability decision over where to shop instead of considering each individual product.
Subconsciously people are more receptive to habit alterations in times of upheaval as the world is experiencing right now du to the Corona Virus.
For that reason Behavioural scientists are seeing this moment as a potentially exciting window for change.
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When the tide goes out, Warren Buffet famously said, you see who’s been swimming naked.
For almost all businesses, Covid19 has seen the tide go so far out it has disappeared over the horizon, exposing not just the bare bums of badly run businesses, but the nether regions of entire sectors who have suddenly found their business models washed out with the sea water.
The question we all face now is, which ones will be able to get back in the swim and which are permanently beached?
Furthr’s top tip for a future of warm water swimming is Airbnb, the most valuable private firm in the US. By next year it seems likely the San Francisco platform will be worth more than the world’s three largest hotel firms combined. Why?
Airbnb has more than 7 million listings worldwide — which is more than Marriott International, Hilton Worldwide, InterContinental Hotels Group, Wyndham Hotel Group, and Hyatt Hotels, combined.
What does that mean? Airbnb is also the only hospitality brand that has the global awareness. A quick look at Google searches shows Airbnb has eclipsed the equity of century-old brands, in one decade, across markets big and small. By 2021, there will be more Airbnb users in the U.S. than people in California. And with no check ins, elevators or public areas, Airbnb may seem a less risky proposition than Covid infected hotels.
Many firms claim to be tech firms that are disruptive, but in fact are not (WeWork). But Airbnb is for real: The firm has a greater share of employees with an engineering background than Amazon or Uber.
The only firms that have the kind of global brand equity plus supply and demand across many nations, allied to an asset-light, high-margin business as Airbnb are credit card companies, who typically trade at 20X multiples of revenue. Airbnb projects revenues of $5-6 billion in 2021, which means a potential valuation of $100-120 billion,
The fact is Covid 19 has rocked an entire industry on its heels. All except one disruptive player: Airbnb. The accelerant of Covid will likely speed Airbnb’s stock price when they eventually go public. The resulting windfall of cash from an IPO would make Airbnb unstoppable.
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On Tuesday Apple’s new iPhone hits the stores powered by super-fast 5G.
Apple CEO Tim Cook hopes it will be the biggest game-changer for Apple’s hardware business in years.
The new iPhones will be 5G equipped, which the firm hopes will trigger a wave of upgrades from Apple’s global audience of nearly one billion iPhone users.
Apple think 18 per cent of iPhone users will trade up in the next 12 months – that is 180m new iPhones sold.
If Apple can persuade Android users to switch to 5G iPhones too, Apple could hit a bonanza: 240m iPhone sold would lead to a 50% gain in valuation to $170 a share which would equal a market cap of three trillion dollars. A lot is at stake, making this release the most significant Apple event in years.
Both Huawei and Samsung released their 5G phones a year ago but uptake has not fast partly because the US has been slow to build 5G infrastructure.
In countries with a mature 5G infrastructure download times are considerably faster than 4G. In the UK download times using 5G are six times faster than 4G and four times faster than Wifi because of new modem and bandwidth technologies.
The new 5G iPhone will be more expensive for Apple to produce and so the firm’s famously fat profit margin may take up to a 10% hit. To compensate, it seems likely Apple will sell the iPhones without headphones or even a wall charger. Even so, Apple may suffer a big earnings miss this Christmas.
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Last week Google announced a billion dollar investment that will be used to build “partnerships” with news publishers and invest in the “future of news.”
Google, you will recall, became effectively the world’s biggest media company without producing or owning any content – simply by running ads against other people’s work. Google has made billions from the work of news publishers for over a decade.
In 2018, for example, Google made $4.7B in ad revenue from running ads against third party news content. Meanwhile it’s the news companies who took all the risk: funding news gathering, putting journalists in harms way. They then effectively turned around and gave their content to Google for free, trading revenues for eyeballs.
Google abused its market position but the media organisations let this happen to them, The result? Since 2004, 1800 US newspapers have gone extinct since 2004
Newspapers in US
2004: 8891
2018: 7112
Given that Google made $125bn in ad revenue in 2019, pledging $1bn to news publishers in 2020 amounts to little more than a sick joke. The donation is timed to coincide to hearings in Washington seeking to investigate Google’s monopolistic business moves. In return for the cash, Google are hoping for favourable coverage.
But until Google’s anti-trust behaviour is properly held to account one thing holds true: it’s good to be a Google shareholder. Sucks to be anyone else.
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Tesla’s stock is up 485% this year – from $86 to a whopping $498- making it the most valuable car company in the world.
It’s so highly valued, in fact, if you combine the value of all the other US automakers together Tesla still eclipses them by far.
Some have excitedly described Tesla as bigger than the iPhone. While that is debatable, it looks as if Tesla has disconnected from being looked at as a car company. Instead, it’s now really being valued as a kind of software proposition.
Musk has been stoking this kind of thinking. In a capital raise last spring the CEO went on a conference call and said, ‘We will have one million Robo-taxis on the road this year, pending regulation.’
But Tesla are still a long way off coming up with the technology to really have a car literally drive itself around.
So is Tesla a battery company instead then? Well, Panasonic makes the batteries, and Tesla uses them.
What Tesla is really good at is getting more range out of a battery than anyone else. And at the moment that is really their secret sauce. But Lucid Motors, an upstart competitor from the US, just debuted a car with a 500-mile range. Tesla’s most expensive luxury car, the Model S, can only go 400 miles.
Norway is a really important market for Tesla, just because the country has had very nice electric vehicles subsidies for the past decade. In 2019, Norway accounted for five per cent of Tesla’s entire sales. So far through to August, the Model 3’s market share has been just 4 per cent in the electrical vehicle space.
And what’s replaced it? A whole bunch of cars from the car companies you might not expect to make electric cars, including Audi, Volkswagon e-Golf, Renault, Hyundai, and even Jaguar. Meanwhile, the high end Model S and X have been outsold by Porsche’s new Taycan.
So what accounts for the big stock price? Take a look at Robinhood, an app that says users can trade stocks commission free.
Robinhood has been very successful at attracting users. In fact, RobinHood’s user-ship has exploded since 2018 from 6m back then to 13m now.
Three million new users have joined Robinhood since March 2020, at around the same time as Google queries on How to trade stocks also peaked.
Since then, Tesla’s stock price started rising in tandem with the number of Robinhood users holding the stock. Or, put another way, if you want to find out what Tesla stock will do tomorrow try to find out how many day traders living in their parents basement signed up for Robinhood accounts today.
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