Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Tag: business

  • Digital businesses’ lost tribe of managers

    Digital businesses’ lost tribe of managers

    Are senior executives lost when discussing their company’s digital strategy?

    At the Huawei Connect conference this morning in Shanghai, Nigel Fenwick, a Vice President and principle analyst of Forrester Consulting, released his company’s study titled Business and Technology Leadership in a Post Digital Era.

    Forrester surveyed 212 IT and business managers across selected markets in North America, Europe and the Asia-Pacific for the survey and found only four percent of business leaders were confident they understood their companies’ digital strategy.

    Even more worryingly less than ten percent of business IT leaders claimed they understood their organisation’s digital strategies.

    The reason for this, Fenwick believes, is the pace of change in the technology sector as managers struggle to put digital innovations into the context of the business.

    Exacerbating this lack of understanding is how companies are ‘bolting on’ digital strategies to their existing business models rather than thinking about how their industries, products and markets are being transformed, Fenwick says.

    There’s little new or surprising in Forrester’s report and the small and selective data set doesn’t inspire confidence in the survey’s results. It is however a good reminder of the challenges facing today’s boards and executives in understanding the consequences of a rapidly changing economy on their businesses.

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  • Uber’s grand experiment

    Uber’s grand experiment

    Yesterday reports emerged that the icon of the disruptive economy, ride sharing service Uber, lost 1.2 billion dollars in first six months of this year.

    Those losses show disruption doesn’t come cheap, although settling the damaging and costly battle with China’s Didi Chuxing will help the company’s cash burn.

    Despite on track to lose at least two billion dollars this year, the company still has a substantial war chest having raised $8.7 billion dollars in debt and equity raisings over the last eighteen months.

    While impressive, that war chest will only last four year at current rates and, given Uber’s already sky high 60 billion dollar valuation and the increasingly hostile Silicon Valley fund raising environment, it will be a relief to investors that the China battle appears settled.

    There remains though an ongoing weakness in Uber’s business however with the company reportedly spending hundreds of millions a year in subsidies to drivers in key markets. How sustainable their business is remains to be seen.

    In many respects Uber is following the Amazon example of beating down competitors by selling products at deep losses thanks to its access to capital and investors’ tolerance for building marketshare.

    As we’ve seen with Amazon, that tactic has been wonderfully effective both in retail and in providing cloud services. For customers and the economy though, the reduced choices in the marketplace may end up not being in their interests.

    Uber is an interesting experiment in how far the Amazon model can be pushed, for cities and states dealing with a deeply disrupted taxi and city transport network the results of that experiment may be telling.

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  • Spreading the tech industry’s footprint

    Spreading the tech industry’s footprint

    Just how broad is the US tech industry? It’s tempting to think that most of the American tech sector is concentrated in San Francisco Bay Area with some offshoots in Seattle and on the East Coast but as this New York Times piece describes, the country has a range of high-tech industry clusters.

    Like Silicon Valley itself many of those clusters exist because of other industries, research facilities or companies – Seattle being home to Boeing, Microsoft and Amazon being an example.

    Another example of how other industries have influenced the development of industry clusters is shown in the example of Philadelphia.

    I hadn’t thought have Philadelphia as having a tech sector until I spoke with Australian tech company Nuix about one of their key North American offices being in the Philadelphia suburb of Conshohocken.

    When I observed that Philadelphia wasn’t the obvious place to set up, Nuix’s managers pointed out how the city’s pharmaceutical, medical technology and telecommunications provide a deep talent pool for tech companies along with the city’s location between New York and Washington DC being an advantage as well.

    Philadelphia’s civic leaders have contributed to it with their Startup Philly program that offers services and incentives ranging from networking events through to a seed investment program.

    VeryApt CEO Ashrit Kamireddi, one of the recipients of a Startup PHL angel round, describes the pros and cons of the city investment program and points out it was the factor in setting up their business there.

    Prior to raising a $270,000 angel round led by StartUp PHL, my two cofounders and I had just graduated from our respective grad programs and had placed 3rd in Wharton’s Business Plan Competition. We could have settled our company anywhere, with New York and San Francisco being the obvious choices. For a startup, the initial round of funding is where geography is most critical. Most angels don’t want to invest outside of their backyard, which explains the natural tendency for startups to relocate where there is the most capital.

    Kamireddi’s point about capital is critical, for tech startups finding funding is probably the most important factor in where the company is based.

    Funding though isn’t the only aspect and for established companies, particularly those in the Bay Area struggling with high costs which is what the New York Times article focuses on in its example of Phoenix, Arizona.

    The spread of the US’s tech sector shows the country’s industrial depth and strength, it also shows how other factors affect the spread of technology businesses.

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  • P&G focusing on Facebook is bad news for media

    P&G focusing on Facebook is bad news for media

    Consumer goods giant Proctor and Gamble has announced they will be dialling back their targeted advertising on Facebook, as they discovered being too precise turns out to stifle sales.

    It turns out that big companies need scale, not precision, so to grow sales they need to be engaging with more people and not restricting their message to niche groups.

    Given the different natures of businesses it’s not surprising to see strategies that work for one group fail dismally for others, but it’s interesting how targeting turns out not to work so well for mass market products.

    The losers though in the P&G story are smaller websites as Wall Street Journal quotes the company’s Chief Marketing Officer as saying they will focus more on the big sites and move away from niche players.

    Mr. Pritchard said P&G won’t cut back on Facebook spending and will employ targeted ads where it makes sense, such as pitching diapers to expectant mothers. He said P&G has ramped up spending both on digital sites and traditional platforms. One category the company is scaling back: smaller websites that lack the reach of sites such as Facebook, Google and YouTube.

     

    Again we’re seeing the early promise of the web failing as economic power continues to be concentrated with a few major platforms. This is also terrible news for media organisations as big advertisers – P&G are the world’s biggest spender – focus on a few sites and increasingly ignore local or niche news publications.

    There’s also the quandary of where the content that Facebook’s users share will come from, with the advertising shifting away from media companies – new players such as Buzzfeed and Huffington Post as well as the old established mastheads – to Google and Facebook, there’s less funds to create interesting and shareable stories.

    P&G’s move is very good for Facebook’s and Google’s shareholder but the future media models still seem a long way off.

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  • Creating alternatives to the NASDAQ

    Creating alternatives to the NASDAQ

    Does it really matter what stock market a company lists on? In my interview with Nuix CEO, Eddie Sheehy for the Australian Financial Review, the question arose about where the company will list for its expected IPO next year.

    Sheehy’s response was clear, “I suspect we’d get just as good a float out of Australia now as we would anywhere else. In fact better, because I think our shareholders are better known, respected and trusted, there’s nothing that I’ve seen in London or Nasdaq that makes me believe we’d get a better outing.”

    Until recently most tech startups aspired to listing on the US NASDAQ exchange and the reasons were compelling as the bourse has a strong technology focus meaning deeper pools of funds, more liquidity along with a community of investors and analysts who had a strong understanding of technology stocks.

    The case for other exchanges

    Now other exchanges are making their case for tech companies listing with them. The London Stock Exchange making a strong argument for prospective IPOs. Singapore, Sydney and many others have similar pitches for the business.

    The problem in those exchanges is the lack of depth in the marketplace. Having a small selection of tech companies listed means limited focus from investors and analysts, it also risks having one or two successful companies dominating the index, as has happened with Xero’s listing on the New Zealand Exchange.

    Xero also illustrates another problem with a listing on an exchange not familiar with the peculiarities of tech stocks at the company’s Sydney AGM a few weeks ago where an investor asked ‘when are you guys going to make a profit?’

    Rod Drury, Xero’s CEO, was able to deflect the question but it showed how companies listed on exchanges where the the high growth, low yield model of tech startups are unusual. On the Australian exchange, this problem is exacerbated by the investor base being dominated by big, dumb institutions.

    Changing perspectives

    Nuix, among Xero and a host of other tech companies, are slowly changing the perspectives of those investors but the focus on yield and safety from both retail and institutional investors will remain an obstacle for ventures launching in more conservative jurisdictions.

    Other factors are the stability, legal and taxation consideration of those jurisdictions. If stockholders are facing barriers realising their investors or the the domicile puts companies at a disadvantage then that country’s stock market won’t be preferred.

    Ultimately though a company’s listing is about access to capital and liquidity. If companies like Xero and Nuix can get both at a reasonable cost by listing on the Australian, Singaporean or London markets, then that’s a choice for their boards.

    It’s hard though to see the NASDAQ being knocked off its perch for moment, although it the US tech bubble does pop things may change.

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