economy | Paul Wallbank - Communications Professional

Google and Microsoft show how online business is changing

Google and Microsoft’s quarterly reports show how all businesses are vulnerable in times of change.

Both Microsoft and Google yesterday reported their second quarter earnings for 2013 and both missed the targets expected analysts. Does this really mean anything?

Microsoft’s earnings were particularly notable as they included a $900 million dollar write off on Surface RT inventories, this almost certainly means a key part of the company’s tablet strategy has failed.

What’s striking in Microsoft’s earnings report is the terrible performance of the Windows Division which saw sales increase 10% year-on-year to 4.4 billion dollars, but earnings collapse by over 50%. Excluding the Surface RT write off, the division would still have seen a ten percent fall.

The company’s statement emphasised how the division is struggling with increasing costs.

Windows Division operating income decreased $1.3 billion, primarily due to higher cost of revenue and sales and marketing expenses, offset in part by revenue growth. Cost of revenue increased $1.2 billion primarily reflecting product costs associated with Surface and Windows 8, including the charge for Surface RT inventory adjustments of approximately $900 million. Sales and marketing expenses increased $344 million, reflecting advertising costs associated with Windows 8 and Surface.

At Google, the company’s 2nd Quarter report show trend is still upwards but the core business of online advertising is showing some cracks as the total number of paid clicks grows, but the value of each falls. At the same time traffic aquisition costs are rising at the same rate as revenues.

This could indicate that advertisers’ appetite for online links is fading. For smaller businesses, the cost of adwords campaigns has been escalating to the point where the old days of newspaper classifieds and Yellow Pages listings start to look cheap.

Couple the cost of advertising with the inevitable ‘ad blindness’ that web surfers have developed and a worrying trend for Google starts to appear. Overall Google’s net profit margin was 26%, down from 31% a year earlier.

While both companies remain insanely profitable – Google earned $14 billion this quarter and Microsoft $6 billion – both businesses are showing stresses as their markets evolve. It proves no business can afford to be complacent in these times.

Australia’s small business crisis

A survey on Australian family owned businesses raises some disturbing questions about the nation’s economy.

The 2013 MGI Australian Family and Private Business Survey is a disturbing document describing a sector that’s aging, pessimistic and struggling with change. It bodes poorly for what should be the powerhouse of the nation’s economy.

Having been conducted over nineteen years, the MGI survey is a very good snapshot of how the sector has evolved over the last two decades and it’s notable how owners are older and not optimistic about their prospects of selling their businesses.

Another key aspect is the changed focus of Australian family businesses; in 2003 forty percent were in manufacturing, this year its half that which probably tracks the decline of the nation’s manufacturing industries.

Most striking though is the aging of the small business community with one in three proprietors being in the 60 to 69 year old bracket, up from one in five just 3 years ago.

That the average age of Australian small business owners is increasing shouldn’t be surprising given the nation’s increasing obsession with property. As home prices become more expensive, it becomes more difficult for younger people to pay off their mortgages or risk their equity on building a business.

Probably the most heart breaking comment from the report is that over half of Australia’s small business owners don’t see an immediate prospect of retiring and nearly two thirds don’t see any chance of an early exit.

58% of family business owner-managers see themselves working in the business beyond 65 years of age, with 65% indicating that their businesses are NOT exit or succession ready.

Part of the reason most Australian family businesses aren’t succession ready is that Generation X and Y buyers crippled by big mortgages simply can’t afford to pay what the older Baby Boomer and Lucky Generation proprietors need to retire upon.

It’s hard not to think that the grand 1980s corporatist vision of Bob Hawke and Paul Keating – that most Australians will work for one of two big corporations while being members of one of two big trade unions – has largely come true.

For Australia though this is not a good thing as the wealth of those corporations, along with that of the nation’s households, is largely tied into the domestic property market.

A discussion on the Macrobusiness website about New Zealand’s property obsession has a graph which illustrates both the Kiwi and Australian economies’ dependence upon house prices.

Those financial assets in the second graph include the value of businesses, and that statistic staying largely flat while housing wealth has gone up fifty percent over the last fifteen years illustrates how dependent the Aussie economy has become upon property speculation.

Property speculation can be fun, particularly when you’re watching people bash down walls on the latest reality TV home improvement show, but it isn’t the basis for a strong economy.

That Australia’s small business sector is aging and increasingly shifting to low value adding service industries is something that should be discussed more as the nation considers what its global role will be in the 21st Century.

Can mobile networks build Myanmar’s economy?

Myanmar, or Burma, is emerging from being a backward economy, can mobile networks help the nation’s economic development?

Fifty years ago Myanmar, or Burma, was one of Asia’s most affluent nations, but a succession of poor governments have seen the country become one of the world’s poorest. Can mobile phone networks be part of Myanmar’s econmic recovery?

The potential economic impact of mobile communications in Myanmar is a report prepared by Deloitte Consulting for network equipment vendor Ericsson claiming that rolling out cellphone networks across the nation will create 90,000 jobs in the emerging economy.

Myanmar is starting from a low base with only 2% mobile penetration rates, compared to over 40% in Timor-Leste and Laos while the average across South-East Asia is over 100%.

To address this the Myanmar Post and Telecommunications Department is looking a splitting the existing phone monopoly into three or possibly four licenses.

Ericsson’s report looks at the economic effects of rolling out these networks and some of the opportunities for local entrepreneurs and communities.

The biggest employment effect identified in the Ericsson/Deloitte report is through the reseller networks with 50,000 of the 90,000 jobs created by new mobile services being in the sales channel.

What’s striking about that prediction is how it doesn’t look at the broader effects of modernising the country’s phone network. The report’s authors do mention they believe the overall benefits could boost the Burmese economy by over 9% in a best case scenario but don’t fully delve into where they believe that growth will come from.

It can be expected there’ll be many more indirect benefits as Myanmar’s communications networks jump into the 21st Century, the report itself has a chapter citing various benefits mobile networks have delivered to countries as diverse as Kenya, Chile and Bhutan.

Particularly interesting with Myanmar’s development will be the Chinese influence in rolling out these networks – the PRC is already the biggest foreign investor in the country having largely ignored western sanctions on the military regime and it can be expected players like Huawei and China Mobile will be well positioned in bidding for licenses and contracts.

For local entrepreneurs the complex Burmese language is a natural opportunity for app developers and programmers to develop localised versions of successful applications, the lack of English and Chinese language skills among the population – another terrible neglect by successive governments – will hamstring Myanmar’s digital media export opportunities.

Probably the biggest risk to Myanmar’s success though is the role of the military who are expected to get one of those mobile licenses.

Burma’s terrible economic performance over the last fifty years has been largely due to the incompetence, greed and corruption of various military rulers and, while their continued influence in the nation’s economy may be necessary to placate them and their cronies, the legacy of these people may act as a break on a really open economy or fair markets.

For Myanmar, the opening of cell phone networks is great opportunity. Hopefully the vested interests that have held this nation back for so long will resist the temptation to further damage the country’s prospects.

Burmese landscape image by ZaNuDa through sxc.hu.

Expat workers and their fragile, guilded cage

The guilded cage for expats is a nice comfortable place to, but it can be a lot more fragile than many think.

I was sitting on the back of a motorbike grimly clutching a briefcase full of 100 baht bills when the realities of working in Thailand really dawned on me.

One of the downsides of being the contracts administrator in an Engineering company is that one gets stuck with the jobs that doesn’t fit anybody’s official duties.

This time it was going to rescue Ken – not his real name – a Kiwi Project Manager who instead of enjoying Friday afternoon in a Soi Cowboy beer bar was under siege in his site hut in suburban Bangkok.

Because of a glitch in the insanely bureaucratic payroll system our Singaporean employers used, Ken’s labourers hadn’t been paid and now they were threatening to burn down the site hut with Ken and his office staff in it.

So the story of Chip Starnes, the US businessman freed yesterday after being held hostage by former employees in his Beijing office for six days, is very familiar. It’s a story that expat workers should understand about their status and position when they take an overseas assignment.

While Chip seems to have come out of the ordeal unscathed apart from being in need of a good night’s sleep and a shower, it could have been much worse; shortly after I left Thailand an Australian accountant was gunned down over a business dispute involving a sugar mill outside Bangkok.

In Dubai, two Australian property developers find themselves mired in a legal dispute that could see them facing a decade in gaol.

The risks involved in being an expat worker are easily to overlook, particularly in places like Dubai, Hong Kong and Singapore where the life is good for western expatriate workers – the reality for Filipino maids or Pakistani labourers is another matter of course.

When things go wrong though, they go wrong badly and the reality of life in a foreign country can be a rude shock for expats who thought they were living a privileged existence.

The guilded cage for expats is a nice, comfortable place to live in but it is a lot more fragile than many think.

For Ken, he escaped being burned out of his site hut by an angry mob as we arrived before the torches were lit. Some frantic dishing out of notes to the crowd – I’m still sure many of those we gave money to didn’t actually work for us – defused the situation.

Ken still got his Friday night beers at Soi Cowboy and took the whole saga as being part of a day’s work in Thailand, but then Ken was an old Asia construction hand who had no illusions of what could befall an innocent expat. Others might not have been so relaxed.

Dubai image from SG777 through SXC.HU

Australia’s startup challenge

Creating a startup culture in Australia is tough when the nation is addicted to property speculation.

While I’ve been using CNet’s story on Kansas City’s startup community to compare Google’s Fiber project with the Australian National Broadband Network, the US article touches on something far more fundamental about Australia’s ability to build new businesses and industries.

The fundamental problem is property prices.

In Kansas City, local entrepreneurs wanting to set up a startup house can afford to take a chance.

The house is the pet project of Web designer and Kansas City local Ben Barreth, who did the insane last fall and cashed in his savings and liquidated his retirement account to put a down payment on a $48,000 house in the city’s Startup Village. Why? Barreth, a husband and father of two small children, wanted to be among the first to buy a house in a Google Fiber neighborhood.

$48,000 for a house is unthinkable in Australia. Even if we disregard Sydney and Melbourne, regional centres are vastly more expensive than their US counterparts. Geelong in Victoria for instance has an average house value of $390,000 while in Wagga Wagga in the New South Wales Riverina district houses sell for a median of over $300,000.

This pattern is true across almost all of populated Australia – it is very, very difficult to find a property under $250,000 and there are few, if any, regions in the country where a house can be bought for less than five times the average local income.

Expensive property comes at a price, it discourages people from starting businesses as the risk of being left out of the property market is so high. Leith van Onselen, co-founder of the Macrobusiness blog, made a very good point about this effect on his decision to set up a business.

Indeed, the main reason why I took the risk of leaving Goldman Sachs to concentrate on MacroBusiness full-time (a start-up business) is that I had all but paid-off my house and was in the fortunate position not to be saddled with onerous mortgage repayments. Had I a large mortgage, like many Australians, there is no way that I would have left a high paying, relatively steady job, to work on a business where pay is much lower and irregular, and where the outcome is unknown.

Leith was commenting on an article in the Sydney Morning Herald reporting the risks to Australian business should property prices fall. In this respect, Australia has managed to paint itself into an economic corner.

The Sydney Morning Herald article illustrates Australia’s predicament – Michael Pascoe (the ‘Pascometer’) reported how Reserve Bank bureaucrat Chris Aylmer had warned of the dangers of falling property prices.

With most Australian businesses dependent on bank finance guaranteed by their proprietor’s home equity, falling property prices would see a nasty economic spiral as lines of credit were called in, forcing companies to slash expenses, including wages, which in turn would drive further real estate falls.

Property also makes up the bulk of Australians’ retirement savings, so a fall in property prices would smash consumer confidence.

It’s no surprise that in the face of a recession or economic shock the first thing Australian governments do is prop up the property market.

Another damaging effect of high property prices is that it turns the country conservative. This graph from Business Spectator’s Philip Soos does much to explain why Australians turned insular in the late 1990s.

Having a population locked into paying their mortgages guarantees a conservative, risk adverse culture and that’s exactly what Australia has achieved over the last fifteen years – much of the opening up from the 1970s through to 1990s has been undone as the country looks inward at protecting its housing prices and bank repayments.

That safe, insular society has its attractions. However if you want to build an entrepreneurial culture, it’s safe to say you can’t get there from here.

While it’s not impossible to build a startup nation in a society addicted to property speculation, it won’t be easy either.

Michael Dell’s struggle to transform his business

The Rationale for a Private Dell states some stark truths about the PC manufacturing industry and global management in general

Michael Dell continues to press on with his buy out bid for the computer manufacturing giant he created with a presentation to shareholders stating his case why Dell Computers would have a better future as a private company.

Dell’s assertion is the company has to move from being a PC manufacturer to a Enterprise Solutions and Services business (ESS) as computer manufacturing margins collapse in the face of a changing market and more nimble, low cost, competitors.

What’s telling in Dell’s presentation is just how fast these changes have happened, here’s some key bullet points from the slide deck.

Dell’s transformation from a PC-focused business to an Enterprise Solutions and Services (ESS) -focused business is critical to its future success, especially as the PC market is changing faster than anticipated.

The transition to the “New Dell” is highly dependent on challenged “Core Dell”performance.

The speed of transformation is critical, yet “Core Dell” operating income is declining faster than the growth of “New Dell” operating income.

Dell’s rate of transformation is being outpaced by the rapid market shift to cloud.

The market is shifting quickly against Dell’s core PC manufacturing and sales business and the company’s founder is under no illusions just how serious the problem is.

Should Michael Dell succeed, the challenge in transforming his business is going to be immense – Dell Computing was one of the 1990s businesses that reinvented both the PC industry and the vast, precise logistics chain that supports it.

It was PC companies like Dell and Gateway who showed the dot com industry how to deliver goods quickly and profitably to customers around the world. Businesses like Amazon built their models upon the sophisticated logistics systems and relationships the computer manufacturers created.

A lesson though for all of those companies that followed Dell and Gateway is that those supply chains may turn around and bite you in the future, as Michael says in his presentation;

Within the PC market, Dell faces increasingly aggressive competition from low cost competitors around the world and shifts in product demand to segments where Dell has historically been weaker.

Those low cost competitors were many of Dell’s suppliers as over time the company’s Chinese manufacturers, Filipino call centres and Malaysian assemblers have developed the management skills to compete with the US retailers rather than just be their contractors.

Something that’s being missed in the debate about globalisation at present is that its not just low value work that can be done offshore – increasingly sales, marketing and legal are moving offshore along with programmers and engineers. Now the same thing is happening with management.

The same thing is also happening with corporations as Asian giants like Samsung, Huawei, Wipro and others displace US and European incumbents.

Dell Computing has been a much a victim of that move as it has been of the decline in the PC market which means its more than one battle Michael Dell has to fight.

It may well be that Dell can survive, but we shouldn’t underestimate just how great the challenge is as the company faces major changes to its markets and the global economy.

We’re all Luddites now – Wage deflation and falling living standards

As the consumerist society runs out of credit, we have to find new ways to drive our economy

A post on today’s Macrobusiness describes how Australia’s General Motors workers being asked to take a pay cut is the harbinger for a general fall in the nation’s wages.

This is coupled with a post by Paul Krugman in the New York Times sympathising with the Luddites as technology takes away many middle class jobs that were not so long ago thought to be the safe knowledge jobs of the future.

Krugman points out that in the United States income inequality started accelerating in the year 2000, the stagnation of most Americans’ incomes started a decade or two before that.

For the last few decades, expanding credit allowed the consumerist society to continue growing, but the crisis of 2008 marked the end of that that economic model. Although governments around the world have tried to keep it alive by pumping money into their economy.

Now we have to face the reality that the Western world’s standard of living is falling for the first time in a century.

For some this is going to be really tough – although one suspects those who will really complain are those least affected.

What is clear is that many of our business and political leaders aren’t prepared to face this change. Dealing with that is going to be the biggest challenge of this decade.

The Present is Unevenly Distributed

The global economy is changing faster than many business and political leaders realise. The future is here now.

“The future is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed” said author William Gibson in a quote often used by futurists and speakers.

A great example of this is the Australian Government’s National Digital Economy Strategy which was re-released last week.

The report itself was met with howls of indifference as the objectives were modest with little new really added since its first release in 2011. What’s notable though almost all the stated objectives for 2020 are achievable today. Here’s the list.

Government service delivery—by 2020, four out of five Australians will choose to engage with the Australian Government online.

Households—by 2020, Australia will rank as one of the top five OECD countries in terms of the proportion of households that connect to broadband.

Businesses and not-for-profit organisations—by 2020, Australia will rank as one of the top five OECD countries in the proportion of businesses and not-for-profit organisations using online opportunities to drive productivity improvements and expand their customer base.

Health and aged care—By 2015, 495,000 patients in rural, remote and outer metropolitan areas will have had virtual access to specialists and by 2020, 25 per cent of all specialists will be participating in delivering telehealth consultations to remote patients. By 2020, 90 per cent of high priority consumers such as older Australians, mothers with babies and those with a chronic disease, or their carers will be able to access individual electronic health records.

Education—by 2020, Australian schools, registered training organisations (RTOs), universities and higher education institutions will have the connectivity to develop and collaborate on innovative and flexible educational services and resources to extend online learning to the home and workplace and the facilities to offer students and learners the opportunity for online virtual learning.

Teleworking—by 2020, Australia will have doubled its level of telework to at least 12 per cent of Australian employees.

Environment and infrastructure—by 2020, the majority of Australian households, businesses and other organisations will have access to smart technology to better manage their energy use.

Regional Australia—by 2020, the gap in online participation and access between households and businesses in capital cities and those in regional areas will have narrowed significantly.

With the exception of the telehealth objective, where the barriers don’t lie in the technology, all of these laudable aims could have been achieved in the past 15 years.

Some of them already have but it’s been missed by the cossetted bureaucrats who write these reports.

For the businesses who aren’t already “using online opportunities to drive productivity improvements and expand their customer base”, these folk are digital roadkill anyway and may as well get jobs driving taxis today.

Probably the most depressing of the objectives is the first one focusing on government service delivery. Here’s Bill Gates’ comment about online government services while visiting Australia.

The Government itself needs to become a model user of information technology, literally seeing government will work with its citizens, with its businesses without paper exchange will be able to do in our taxes, licences, registrations, all these things, on a basis where you don’t have to know the organisation of government and its various departments, you don’t have to stand in line, you don’t have to work with paperwork.

Gates’ comments were made in September 2000.

That a vision for the future is so modest, mundane and achievable today is probably the most disappointing thing of all with reports like the Australian National Digital Economy strategy.

Not only is the future unevenly distributed but so too are the jobs and prosperity that will flow from it, if you’re going to have a vision. You better have a good one.

Image courtesy of pdekker3 on sxc.hu

The myth of the baby boomer

Are we making a mistake when we talk about the demographics of baby boomers?

Yesterday I was at the release of Deloitte’s State of Media Democracy report when something that’s been bugging me for a while became clear – have we got our definitions of baby boomers wrong?

In the report’s demographic breakup was the usual breakdown of age groups with the interesting twist of separating ‘leading Millennials’ and ‘trailing Millennials’.

Such separation makes sense, how a sixteen year old uses the media is very different from that of a 26 year old, however there’s a good argument breaking up the baby boomer group the same way.

While there’s no denying the post World War II baby boom in most Western countries that lasted roughly from 1945 to 1965, lumping the entire group into one demographic bubble with the same economic characteristics seems mistaken.

If nothing else, the baby boomers should be broken into two groups – those born before 1955 and those afterwards.

Those born between 1945 and 55 had the benefit of being born into the a world rebuilding from the second world war and the massive improvement in living standards that accompanied the reconstruction.

For those born after 1955 their work experience was very different; the 1973 oil shock marked the end of the post war economic certainties and also saw the beginning of increased casualisation of the workforce through the deregulations that accelerated under the Reagan, Thatcher and other Western governments in the 1970s and 80s.

In many ways, the 1955-65 cohort of baby boomers have more in common with the generation who followed them – the Generation Xers, the term coined by the author Douglas Coupland who was born in 1961.

Equally, the earlier half of the baby boomers have much more in common with those born between 1935 and 45, the ‘war babies’ were too young to fight in World War II and they benefited greatest of all from the post war economic boom.

So perhaps we should be talking of the ‘Lucky Generation’ – those born between 1935 and 55 – and redefining ‘Generation X’ as those born 1955 and 80.

While it’s easy to say “who cares”, there’s an important aspect to this. Much of our discussion about the aging population revolves around the boomers retiring and the load this puts on the community.

Not to mention the foibles, beliefs and voting patterns of the boomers which again differ markedly between the ‘early boomers’ and ‘late boomers’.

If we accept that the tipping point wasn’t in 2010 when the first baby boomers reached retirement, but in 2000 when the ‘lucky generation’ started retiring then this discussion about how we service a growing – and demanding – group of retirees becomes even more pressing.

As in many things, life is a lot more complex than the lazy assumptions of demographers and economists would have us believe.

The myth that the baby boomers are one big fat group with equal demands, needs and assets is something may turn out to fool many of our business and political leaders.

Dicing up the mobile web

A series of reports last week told how we use computers, tablets and smartphones is evolving. There are big consequences for all businesses.

Last week we had a series of reports on the changing web from Cisco, IBM and Ericsson along with Mary Meeker’s annual State Of The Internet presentation.

One thing all the reports agreed on was there is going to be a lot more data pushed around the net and the composition is changing as business and home users adapt to smartphones and tablet computers.

Cisco’s Visual Networking Index forecast online traffic would triple by 2017 while Ericsson’s Mobility Report predicts mobile internet traffic will grow twelve times by 2018.

What’s notable in those predictions is the amounts and types of data the different devices use. Cisco breaks down monthly traffic by device;

Smartphones 0.6 GB
Tablet computers 2.7 GB
Laptops and PCs 18.6 GB

In one way this isn’t surprising as the devices have differing uses and their form factors make it harder to consume more data. Cisco also points out that data consumption also varies with processor power. As PCs are the most powerful devices, it makes sense they would chew through more information.

Ericsson breaks down data use by application as well as device and that clearly shows the different ways we’re using these devices.

Notable in the graph is how file sharing is big on PCs but not on tablets or smartphones while email and social networking take up a bigger chunk of cellphone usage.

What’s also interesting in Ericsson’s predictions is how data traffic evolves. It’s notable that video is forecast to be the biggest driver of growth.

Both Ericsson’s and Cisco’s predictions tie into Mary Meeker’s State Of The Internet presentation at the D11 Conference last week.

It’s worth watching Meeker’s presentation just for the way she packs over eighty slides into twenty minutes with a lot of information on how the economy is changing as the internet matures.

What all of these reports are telling us is that our society and economy are changing as these technologies mature. The business opportunities – and risks – are huge and there isn’t any industry that’s immune to these changes.

Enniskillen and the G8’s Potemkin Village

Britain puts on a brave, if false, face for the G8 leaders summit

In the middle of this month the G8 group of world leaders will meet in Northern Ireland when the UK takes their turn to host the annual conference.

With the leaders of eight of the world’s biggest economies – which includes Canada but not China – coming to visit the Northern Irish government is anxious to present a prosperous face to the world, including allocating £233,000 to give Enniskillen’s town centre a ‘facelift’.

It seems a good chunk of the facelift money has been spent on creating fake shops in the distressed town’s centre.

In a little over two weeks they and other leaders will gather for a G8 summit at a golf resort in Enniskillen. And as the date approaches the cleanup is moving into high gear. It includes new coats of paint on houses, tidying up lawns, and putting up fake storefronts on shuttered businesses.

For the visiting dignitaries, their advisors and the media caravans that follow them, Enniskillen’s shops will be looking prosperous when the reality is very different.

“The County of Fermanagh has suffered terribly as a result of the credit crisis and the resulting recession,” says Dan Keenan of the Irish Times.

Fermanagh County’s efforts to present a brave, if false, face to the world is symptomatic of the Western world’s refusal to accept the consumer based economy that drove the Corporatist model of government over the past fifty years is over.

Just as the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 signalled the end of the Soviet experiment, the global financial crisis of 2008 marked the end for the big spending, big debt era which had driven the Western economies through the last half of the Twentieth Century.

Unlike the Soviets, we refused to accept the game is up and have kept a failing economic philosophy alive with massive borrowing and money printing. In this respect, we’re dumber the Russian communist leaders who accepted the reality of the world they found themselves confronting in 1989.

All of which will probably amuse Russian President Vladimir Putin as his motorcade speeds past the repainted shopfronts of Enniskillen and no doubt he’ll be thinking of the face Russia will present next year when they host the G8 Summit.

Perhaps its time for the G8 leaders to invite the People’s Republic of China to join their privileged club – at present Japan is the only non-‘white’ nation.

If the G8 decide to let the Chinese join, there’s the South China Mall that would be a perfect counterpoint to the Potemkin Village of Enniskillen and the world’s great leaders can continue to believe that the business rules of the 1980s still hold true today.

Yesterday’s men are still pursuing yesterday’s dreams, dressing up Enniskillen may cater to their fantasies but it won’t help today’s economy.

Picture of a propped up facade courtesy of Ingolfson through Wikipedia Commons.

Are Australians becoming apathetic towards retail?

Have Aussies given up on retailers?

This morning IBM launched their Retail Therapy report where they looked at the state of online shopping around the world.

One interesting aspect to the report is that Australians seem to have become indifferent to stores with 60% of the 2000 respondents claiming they were ‘apathetic’ towards their choice of retailers.

At least this is an improvement on the 2011 report where 46% of those survey said they were ‘antagonistic’, this year that proportion is a mere 5%.

So, have we gone from hating our retailers to simply not caring any more? The answers should be focusing the minds of Australian CEOs if they are hoping for consumers to reopen their wallets.

Image of a bored girl by ChristieM through sxc.hu