Forbes (October 29)
“Zoom is now worth more than ExxonMobil.” Reaching a market cap of $139 billion, the conferencing service pulled ahead of ExxonMobil ($138.9 billion). Revenues are an altogether different matter. “While Zoom posted $1.35 billion in revenue over the past 12 months, Exxon, by comparison, posted $213.8 billion in revenue during that time period.”
Tags: Conferencing, ExxonMobil, Market-cap, Revenues, Service, Zoom
WARC (June 1)
“As lockdowns start to ease and the scale of the economic challenge becomes clear, uneasy businesses are adjusting to a future which is looking decidedly different from the one they had planned for at the start of 2020.” For starters, many are slashing advertising spend as they move “back to basics: service and trust,” while also focusing more on online presence and purchases.
Tags: Adjusting, Advertising spend, Basics, Ease, Economic challenge, Future, Lockdowns, Online, Service, Trust, Uneasy
Fast Company (December 24)
Despite fears of a brick-and-mortar retail apocalypse, many retailers “are flourishing in the age of Amazon. After all, more than 90% of retail sales still happen in the real world, and as relentless as Bezos is, it’s not likely he’ll swallow up all of brick-and-mortar on his own. The truth is that the bigger Amazon gets, the more opportunity it creates for fresh, local alternatives. The more Amazon pushes robot-powered efficiency, the more space there is for warm and individualized service.”
Tags: Amazon, Bezos, Brick-and-mortar, Efficiency, Flourishing, Fresh, Local, Retailers, Service
Nikkei Asian Review (April 20)
“Transportation and logistics networks brought to a standstill by the recent earthquakes in Kyushu are starting to return to life, while utilities are striving to restore such crucial services as electricity and gas.” Kumamoto Airport has partially reopened and the shinkansen resumed service to Kagoshima, but nearly 100,000 households still lack running water and gas. In contrast, electricity has been restored to all but 6,500 households.
Tags: Airport, Earthquakes, Electricity, Gas, Kagoshima, Kumamoto, Kyushu, Logistics, Service, Shinkansen, Transportation, Utilitie, Water
Financial Times (October 11)
If Uber “wants to continue to grow in London and around the world, Uber needs to be able to persuade politicians that it is worth facing down the established taxi operators who are resisting change. If vested interests prevent its innovations in service from reaching their full potential, it would count as an enormous missed opportunity.”
Tags: Change, Innovation, London, Missed opportunity, Politicians, Potential, Service, Taxi operators, Uber
Financial Times (May 2)
“First money and low-cost production jumped across borders, now it is creativity and services.” Knowledge intensive flows “are now worth a heady $12.6tn; to set this in context, this is half of all cross-border flows, and almost four-fifths the size of the US economy.” This new “globalisation does not just threaten western manufacturing jobs, but many service jobs too.”
Tags: Borders, Creativity, Globalisation, Jobs, Knowledge, Low-cost, Manufacturing, Money, Production, Service, Services, U.S.
New York Times (May 29)
SoftBank’s takeover of the mobile phone provider Sprint could benefit U.S. consumers. SoftBank “was largely responsible for making high-speed Internet affordable to consumers in the early 2000s by offering faster service and at prices that were less than half of N.T.T.’s rates. A few years later, it used a similar low-price strategy in the wireless business. If it competes aggressively in the United States, SoftBank could help shake up the highly concentrated American industry.”
Tags: Consumers, Internet, N.T.T., Phones, Prices, Service, SoftBank, Sprint, Takeover, U.S., Wireless