Take-Away 1: Adobe Inc. is a good example of many of the strengths of traditional software economics. It has evolved and expanded over decades to become a full suite of creative tools. It is now trying to expand from creative tools to operating tools. Take-Away 2: However, purely digital companies need to protect their attractive […]
On a 2018 earnings call, Elon Musk said he disagreed with one of Warren Buffett’s core investment principles — that companies should use strategic “moats” to disengage with competitors. “If your only defense against invading armies is a moat, you will not last long,” Musk said. “What matters is the pace of innovation — that […]
Competitive advantages can be build on the demand and the supply side. And advantages on the demand (i.e., revenue) side are usually about customer capture in some form. One general category for this is when a company captures a “share of the consumer mind.” In this talk, I go into how some companies do this […]
Competitive advantages can be build on the demand and the supply side. And advantages on the demand (i.e., revenue) side are usually about customer capture in some form. One general category for this is when a company captures a “share of the consumer mind.” In this talk, I go into how some companies do this […]
It’s easy to get lost in all the factors and phenomena emerging as digital and data technology transform industry after industry. As I have argued before, there are actually four things happening at once: Accelerating digital transformation and / or disruption. New digital tools and data technologies keep emerging. There’s big data and AI. There […]
Take-Away 1: Hello bike-sharing is a marginally profitable, small services business. Its recent shift to ebikes (and subscriptions) is increasing its revenue and making it more defendable. But it is also changing the economics. Take-Away 2: Hello is trying to build a platform business model on its large user base. A marketplace for mobility (like […]
This week’s podcast is about online-merge-offline (OMO) platforms. A business model that is just emerging in China. I talk about Sun Art Retail and Beike / Lianjia as examples. You can listen to this podcast here or at iTunes, Google Podcasts and Himalaya. Here is the BCG article I mentioned. —– Related podcasts and articles are: Lianjia and […]
This week’s podcast is about online-merge-offline (OMO) platforms. A business model that is just emerging in China. I talk about Sun Art Retail and Beike / Lianjia as examples. You can listen to this podcast here or at iTunes, Google Podcasts and Himalaya. Here is the BCG article I mentioned. —– Related podcasts and articles are: Lianjia and […]
One of the big digital China IPOs of 2020 was KE Holdings. Which does business under the brand names Lianjia and Beike. Lianjia, founded in 2001, is one of the biggest residential real estate brokerages in China. In 2019, it had +6,000 locations across China and +120,000 real estate brokers. In 2019, they completed 2.2M […]
In Part 1, I wrote about hypermarkets as business models. It is one of the few retail business models I kinda like. But it is the combination of Sun Art’s hypermarkets and the Alibaba ecosystem that is really interesting. It puts it at the frontier of new retail. And it makes it almost entirely unique. […]