I wrote about Alibaba’s 11 growth strategies in the fall of 2020. At their investors day, management laid them out in pretty good detail. You can see my write-up at: Dissecting Alibaba’s 11 Growth Strategies. From Investor Day 2020 (pt 1 of 2). (Jeff’s Asia Tech Class – Daily Lesson / Update) This is my […]
There is a lot to like about Alibaba (from a strategy and competition perspective). Massive, almost unprecedented, competitive strength. It’s a complementary platform and a digital-physical hybrid. That puts it at the top of my competitive strength pyramid. It is riding the mother of all secular trends – the rising wealth of Chinese families. And […]
Sea Limited is rocking and rolling. Jumping from gaming to ecommerce. Then to payment and financial services. And now to Mexico. There is a growing public consensus that the Sea management team is extraordinarily effective. That’s cool. But it would have been much better to know that two years ago, when the stock was much […]
Sea Limited is rocking and rolling. Jumping from gaming to ecommerce. Then to payment and financial services. And now to Mexico. There is a growing public consensus that the Sea management team is extraordinarily effective. That’s cool. But it would have been much better to know that two years ago, when the stock was much […]
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 […]
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 […]
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. That combination puts it at the frontier of new retail. And it makes it almost entirely […]
A subscriber suggested I look at Sun Art Retail as a potential investment opportunity. And, wow, thanks for that. There is a lot of fascinating stuff going on with this company. First, the basics of Sun Art. An Introduction to Sun Art Retail Group Founded in 2000, Sun Art is a leading Chinese retailer with […]