The hottest new internet companies are growing up outside the USA

Published on October 25, 2011 in High Tech & Media and Social Media. 0 Comments Tags: .

High-value financings for venture-backed private internet and digital media companies seem to be happening at a rapid pace. Dropbox, Tumblr, AirBnB, Foursquare, and Spotify have all raked in big fundings and attained record valuations in recent months. Meanwhile, public investors are decidedly less sanguine. The Nasdaq Composite index is flat for the year – and the average internet and digital media company is down 50% from 52-week highs.

As you can see from the chart, only six of the 116 publicly-traded internet companies are projected by analysts to achieve over 30% top-line growth in 2011 and 2012 and to achieve 2012 EBITDA margins of at least 30%. That means only 5% of the current crop of public internet companies are in the top echelon in terms of profitability and growth.

Let’s take a further look at these six companies: Baidu, Tencent, Yandex, Mail.ru, Qihoo 360 Technology, and MercadoLibre. What do these companies all have in common? Most obviously, they all operate outside the U.S. Second, they are being richly rewarded by public investors – all six are presently valued at at least 10x revenue – a very meaningful premium over the group of internet and digital media companies as a whole, where median revenue multiples fall in the 1-3x range, depending on subset [Read more].

Amazon, the Company That Ate the World

Published on October 25, 2011 in Global Strategy. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , .

Jeff Bezos’ new tablet, the Kindle Fire, is cheap, pretty, and puts Amazon in perfect position to take a bite out of Apple—and every online transaction you make.

Jeff Bezos is channeling Apple. It’s mid-September and the wiry billionaire founder of Amazon.com (AMZN) is at his brand-new corporate headquarters in Seattle, in a building named Day One South after his conviction that 17-year-old Amazon is still in its infancy. Almost giddy with excitement, Bezos retrieves one by one the new crop of dirt-cheap Kindle e-readers—they start at $79—from a hidden perch on a chair tucked into a conference room table. When he’s done showing them off, he stands up, and, for an audience of a single journalist, announces, “Now, I’ve got one more thing to show you.” He waits a half-beat to make sure the reference to Jobs’s famous line from Apple (AAPL) presentations hasn’t been missed, then gives his notorious barking laugh. With that, Bezos pulls out the Kindle Fire, Amazon’s long-anticipated tablet computer—and the first credible response to the Apple iPad [Read more].

Building a Company Without Borders

Published on October 21, 2011 in Global Strategy. 0 Comments Tags: .

They say you can’t go home again. If you work for Reckitt Benckiser, you can go home—but you may not want to, and you certainly won’t have to.

Most of our top managers haven’t held jobs in their countries of origin for years and view themselves as global citizens rather than as citizens of any given nation. We have operations in more than 60 countries. Our top 400 managers represent 53 different nationalities. We’ve spent the past 10 years building this culture of global mobility because we think it’s one of the best ways to generate new ideas and create global entrepreneurs [Read more].

Reckitt Benckiser resulted from a merger in 1999 of Reckitt & Colman—a British purveyor of household cleaning products with a great stable of brands—and the Dutch-listed Benckiser, a much smaller but better-performing consumer goods company. But we don’t want to be known as an Anglo-Dutch enterprise, or by any other label based on our operations or history. We’re not any country’s company—we’re a truly multicountry company.

Ubiquitous computing: Technology will become even more personal

Published on October 16, 2011 in High Tech & Media. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .

Researchers such as Ms Bell conclude that ubiquitous computing, or “ubicomp” to its fans, is no longer the realm of science fiction. In a series of articles in the 1990s Mark Weiser, the chief technologist at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Centre (PARC), laid out a vision of a world in which computers would be everywhere yet all but invisible. Instead of the conventional desktop or laptop, Mr Weiser (who died in 1999) and one of his colleagues, John Seely Brown, predicted that in this new era of “calm technology” gadgets would adapt to people rather than vice versa.

If there is one part of the world where personal technology is on its way towards becoming ubiquitous it is Asia, where several richer countries have created impressive infrastructures on which all sorts of personal technologies can work. South Korea, for instance, plans that every home in the country should have an internet connection with a speed of up to one gigabit per second (fast enough to download a full-length feature film in a matter of seconds). And it also intends greatly to increase the capacity of the country’s wireless-broadband networks [Read more].

The future in 140 characters

Published on October 16, 2011 in Ranting and Raving and Social Media. 0 Comments

The World in 2012: What will next year bring?

This year The World in 2012 has also invited a number of contributors to make their predictions in the space of 140 characters.

If you are not a Twitter user you can still take part by leaving your prediction (in no more than 140 characters) in the comments below. Winners will be announced near the date of publication, in mid-November. Good luck [Read more]!

Paul Allen: The Singularity Isn’t Near

Published on October 14, 2011 in High Tech & Media. 0 Comments Tags: , .

The Singularity Summit approaches this weekend in New York. But the Microsoft cofounder and a colleague say the singularity itself is a long way off.

Futurists like Vernor Vinge and Ray Kurzweil have argued that the world is rapidly approaching a tipping point, where the accelerating pace of smarter and smarter machines will soon outrun all human capabilities. They call this tipping point the singularity, because they believe it is impossible to predict how the human future might unfold after this point [Read more].

Google close to launching music service

Published on October 14, 2011 in Global Strategy and Social Media. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Google is reportedly preparing to launch its own Mp3 store, according to the New York Times. Citing unnamed “music executives,” the report said Thursday that the company will open the store in the next several weeks [Read more].

Music is becoming a key part of Google’s drive for dominance online. Amazon, Google, Facebook and Apple are all locked in a race to become the one-stop shop for social, shopping, media and communication. Amazon has a cloud music player that’s hooked into its huge library of tracks. Facebook recently announced integration with Spotify, which will let users listen to music together with their friends [Read more].

Innovation, made in Russia

Published on October 13, 2011 in Global Strategy and High Tech & Media. 0 Comments Tags: , .

Skolkovo, just outside of Moscow, wants to become Russia’s Silicon Valley.

The first trip to the Silicon Valley often has a profound impact on foreign entrepreneurs. But for 13 Russian startups currently touring the region, visiting the Valley isn’t just about changing their own point of view; it’s about changing their country.

The idea is to encourage young Russians to take risks, pursue IT opportunities, and maybe adopt a little bit of Silicon Valley culture in the process. Like the idea that failing with a startup doesn’t mean you need to change careers. IT Cluster Deputy Director for Education and Research Katia Gaika told me that Silicon Valley’s embrace of failing is very foreign to people in Russia. “Failure is not acceptable,” she said.

The startups, all part of the state-sponsored Skolkovo IT Cluster, are accompanied by a reality TV crew that documents their every move [Read more].

The emerging economies have had a great decade. That was the easy part

Published on October 12, 2011 in Emerging Markets. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .

The IMF’s latest forecast is that emerging economies will grow by more than 6% in 2011 and 2012. But growth in the rich world is likely to be below 2%.

Twenty of the 42 economies covered in the back pages of The Economist grew by 3% or more in the year to the latest quarter. Only two of these, Austria and Sweden, are from the traditional group of rich countries. The rest are developing economies, such as Brazil and Turkey, or newly rich ones, such as Taiwan and Hong Kong.

Yet the growth of emerging economies is unlikely to continue at the same rapid pace or without occasional downturns. As economies become richer, they can rely less and less on the brute force of capital spending, coupled with a steady flow of cheap rural migrants, to fuel their expansion. They have a greater need of a skilled workforce and a modern financial system that is attuned to where the best returns might be found.

The shift will not be easy. The coming decade is therefore likely to prove harder for the emerging markets. China and others are entering the tricky middle-income stage of development in which the big advances from absorbing rich-world technology start to run out [Read more].

Samsung: The next big bet

Published on October 9, 2011 in Emerging Markets and Global Strategy. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

The world’s biggest information-technology firm is diving into green technology and the health business. It should take care; its rivals should take notice.

In 2000 Samsung started making batteries for digital gadgets. Ten years later it sold more of them than any other company in the world. In 2001 it threw resources into flat-panel televisions. Within four years it was the market leader. In 2002 the firm bet heavily on “flash” memory. The technology it delivered made the iPhone and iPad a reality, and made Samsung Apple’s biggest supplier—and now its biggest hardware competitor.

The handsome payoffs from these ballsy bets made the South Korean company a colossus; last year its sales passed $135 billion. Now it is embarking on a similarly audacious plan to move away from electronics into technologies where it barely has a presence today. It intends to spend $20 billion over ten years on solar panels, light-emitting diodes (LEDs) used for lighting, electric-vehicle batteries, medical devices and biotech drugs.

These businesses shift Samsung away from easily substitutable gadgets towards more essential industrial goods (see table)—or from “infotainment” to “lifecare”, as the company puts it. Just as electronics defined swathes of the 20th century, the company believes green technology and health care will be central to the 21st [Read more].