In this podcast, Jeffrey Towson discusses how big Ant Financial, the financial arm of Alibaba, could become. He considers factors such as its current size, its growth rate, and its plans for expansion. For example, Ant Financial is already the world’s largest mobile payments company, and it is growing at a rapid pace.
In Part 1 (From Big, Dumb Bureaucracies to Zero-Human Operations (pt 1 of 2), I made the following argument: In the industrial age, enterprises were built on the advantages of scale. Companies went from workshops and small factories to big factories capable of mass production. Superior scale gave companies multiple advantages, including cost efficiencies and […]
In this podcast, Jeffrey Towson discusses whether Baidu can become the new AT&T in China. He considers factors such as Baidu’s strengths in search and artificial intelligence, as well as the challenges it faces from rivals like Alibaba and Tencent. For example, Baidu has a strong foothold in the Chinese search market, but it faces competition from Alibaba in the e-commerce market and Tencent in the social media market.
Didi and Uber are two of the largest ride-hailing platforms in the world. However, they are facing increasing competition from other companies. In order to maintain their market share, these companies need to make it difficult for drivers to switch to other platforms. One way to do this is to create high driver switching costs.
I like audience builders as platform. They have interesting complexities and variations. They are more interesting than marketplaces and payment platforms. Plus, audience builder platforms are combining with e-commerce quite nicely. Spotify, TikTok, and China Literature are all audience builders I like. But they are really different, even though they all basically connect content creators […]
Digital platforms have become the “super predators” of business. They have a number of advantages over traditional businesses, including network effects, economies of scale, and data-driven insights. Businesses that want to succeed in this new era of competition need to adapt to the platform economy.