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For the past ten years, companies have been working on getting cars to be able to drive themselves. Waymo, a subsidiary of Google is already testing a fleet of self-driving cars in Phoenix, Arizona. Furthermore, Tesla is gathering data at an increasingly rapid pace, especially with the introduction of the Model 3. These new companies that are positioning themselves somewhere in the car market could prove to become significant disrupters to the car space.

The first possible threat to incumbents is that once true self-driving becomes available, it will set the standard for the rest of the industry. The companies that can provide autonomous driving will be able to serve the biggest portion of the market. Another threat comes in combination with other services that are enabled by autonomous driving, like car-sharing platforms. These platforms will further mitigate the need for car ownership and possibly cannibalize a large portion of car sales. Just think of all cars in existence that are used only an hour per day, car-sharing will allow cars to be utilized far more per day and decrease the total amount of cars needed.

Luckily autonomous driving also provides significant opportunities for the car industry as a whole. One will be numerous new business models that will be enabled by autonomous driving. A car could provide a variety of entertainment services while somebody is travelling, diversifying the revenue streams. Furthermore, new data services like optimization and fleet management, like for car-sharing businesses, could provide car manufactures with significant services revenue streams. And if car manufacturers would also be able to develop their autonomous driving software, this could be sold in for example different kinds of monthly subscriptions. This will allow car manufactures to personalize their cars even further and capture more value from the customers that are willing to pay.

All things considered, autonomous driving could be both a driver of revenue growth within the industry while being a major risk at the same time. Companies now relevant within the industry and that are not working on an autonomous future could be left behind. So, even though the development and legal frameworks could take decades, the future will most certainly be autonomous.

https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/automotive-and-assembly/our-insights/private-autonomous-vehicles-the-other-side-of-the-robo-taxi-story

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The E-commerce giant Coupang, also known as the Amazon of South Korea, is one of the most successful E-commerce giants in Asia. But this wasn’t always the case, it initially started off as a Groupon clone, selling discounted products in a sort of window style shop. Yet, through aggressive marketing tactics, the customer base grew exponentially. When one of the biggest tech investors (Softbank) noted the potential, it partnered up with Coupang. This way, it provided Coupang with both experience and funding to eventually become the 12-billion-dollar E-Commerce giant it is today. But what makes this E-commerce giant so special?

Just like most E-commerce businesses, the platform forms the basis of the company. Generally, an advantage of a platform is that it enables significant economies of scale and sell more other products and services to customers. And Coupang is utilizing this potential to the maximum. The significant economies of scale are primarily enabled by their own distribution network, as Coupang has more than 200 warehouses in South Korea. Furthermore, it has its own delivery service. This allows Coupang to also sell normal and fresh groceries through the originally non-food consumer goods distribution network. In theory, this could provide Coupang significant costs advantages. Additionally, because Coupang has so many customers, they started to offer even more services like a fresh food delivery service and video streaming service, maximizing the number of services and products they can sell through their platform.

To conclude, the way Coupang started by only selling discounted non-food consumer goods and grew to the company it is today feels like a textbook example of how to maximize value from an online platform. The online platform provided Coupang with enough revenue to justify the building of its own distribution network. The distribution network then made it possible to sell groceries to the same customers. And with many people doing daily shopping on your platform, services like food delivery and online streaming will almost automatically get more attention.

References:

https://www.economist.com/business/2021/02/18/coupang-hopes-to-be-the-next-successful-baby-amazon

Coupang – Changing the face of retail and distribution