Category Archives: Business

Buy Samsung Shares

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samsung

Well, if only. You pretty much need to live in South Korea to buy them…

Google is being forced by the EU to decouple their core, profitable products, from Android. Which opens up opportunities for big players with big market share.

Samsung and the flavours.

Samsung sell so many phones that they can sell different versions of each model, a Google version and a Microsoft version.

One has Google’s email, calendar, search and so on built-in by default. The other has the Microsoft equivalent. No antitrust laws apply because the consumer is a given a choice at the very beginning. It could be argued that it is an antitrust duoply, but no other quality eco-systems exist for Samsung to offer.

Samsung can then seek kickbacks from Google or Microsoft to promote their services.

Or, Samsung could just end up with one Microsoft-dominated system. Microsoft will pay them generously to get the Bing search engine into mobile hands. They’ll get away with it for a few years, and then merely need to change it when EU regulators complain.

Delivered Meal Kits: Doomed to Fail

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Meal kit companies won’t last. Well, I guess one might, after buying out some others and offering a huge range. And maybe one more if it targets the wealthy. But the others won’t.

No first mover advantage. It is the opposite. With time many people will want to try something new, and will move to a new service offering a bargain first few weeks. Food is like fashion, it has frequent change, especially at the low end.

Delivery doesn’t suit everyone, especially those in apartments.

Not profitable. I guarantee that all the current services are breaking even or losing money. When they put up their prices, people will leave. And any economy of scale from getting more customers will be lost by delivering to them – as they have all started where delivery is the cheapest.

Fad. Just like diets, a lot of current customers are experimenting with a new of doing things, but will soon resort to their old ways.

Supermarkets. Even here in Australia, they have started stocking meal kits. No subscription required!

The future – small stores, conveniently located, that sell meal kits and gourmet frozen meals. Yes, 7/11 etc could stock them, or they could be standalone specialist stores. People will pay a premium to not be in a subscription. Not being subscription means  not knowing how many of each to stock. So you stock less so that by a certain time you have run out, and some customers don’t get to buy. This works if the food is desirable enough. And anything that hasn’t sold by 8pm is half price.

Baja California Entrepreneur Economic Zone

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Baja California is close to California, and easily defined geographically. It is popular with Americans.

Concept: attract internet companies to bring their money to Mexico.

  • no business or personal income tax for qualifying businesses
  • special temporary resident visas
  • minimum staff numbers and revenue requirements
  • 2% of corporate revenue and 15% of personal income must be invested in new Mexican businesses, with exclusions like real estate
  • Outside of the top 20 employees, 50% of salaries in value must be paid to Mexican citizens

Long-term goal, like one or two generations away, USA/Canada/Mexico will be like the EU. Better for everyone.

Memo Alert

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Many companies, recently Google and Facebook, have been embarassed by internal memos that were leaked to the public.

I propose a memo system where staff members receiving a bulk memo can click on a button to say “I think this memo could damage our company if it got out”.

It is anonymous. If enough people vote against the memo, the authors or their superiors could look into it.