This is the last post of the Weekly reading series in 2021. Hope you have enjoyed it!
What I wrote last week
I wrote about VRIO, a business strategy framework that can help analyze a company’s competitive advantages
Business
‘Spider-Man: No Way Home’ Swoops In With a Pandemic-Record Opening. The global gross of $257 million during opening weekend is the 3rd highest of all time. Remember that this is the 27th movie in the Marvel Universe Cinematic and it’s achieved during a global pandemic. Disney’s ability to draw viewers and make great content consistently is just extraordinary. However, it creates a conundrum for the company. Putting content in theaters will haul in a truckload of money and boost the top and bottom line. That also means Disney+, the flagship streamer, will have to wait for at least a certain amount of time to feature the hottest movies, diminishing its power to attract subscribers. Unfortunately for the iconic company, Wall Streets cares a lot about Disney+ subscriber count. Hence, the management team will have their hands full in the next year or two finding the right balance in terms of content distribution
Amazon’s grocery battle isn’t what you think. As an Amazon shareholder, I’d prefer the company owning the software powering stores to operating physical grocery shops. The reason is simple. Grocery is a low-margin business and the competition is fierce. Even if Amazon manages to operate cashier-less stores, chances are that they won’t reach the scale of Costco or Walmart to compete in unit economics. Owning the software powering other stores; however, is profitable. A few retailers already tested out Amazon Go technology. Now, Amazon just needs to prove their worth and scale it to make this another great and profitable business
Bob Iger Makes His Disney Exit as a Titan of Transformation. Bob Iger will go down in history as one of the best CEOs ever. His work transformed Disney and put it in the position that it is now. I like his book The Ride of a Lifetime too.
How Shopify Outfoxed Amazon to Become the Everywhere Store. “In late 2015, in one of Bezos’ periodic purges of underachieving businesses, he agreed to close Webstore. Then, in a rare strategic mistake that’s likely to go down in the annals of corporate blunders, Amazon sent its customers to Shopify and proclaimed publicly that the Canadian company was its preferred partner for the Webstore diaspora. In exchange, Shopify agreed to offer Amazon Pay to its merchants and let them easily list their products on Amazon’s marketplace. Shopify also paid Amazon $1 million—a financial arrangement that’s never been previously reported. Bezos and his colleagues believed that supporting small retailers and their online shops was never going to be a large, profitable business. They were wrong—small online retailers generated about $153 billion in sales in 2020, according to AMI Partners. “Shopify made us look like fools,” says the former Amazon executive.”
6th Annual Grocery Tech Trends Study. “74% of grocers report that the tight labor market is a major obstacle that will drive their retail technology investment over the next 18 months. More than half (54%) of grocers are increasing their year-over-year tech spend, with a focus on advancing digital and mobile capabilities, analytics-driven decision-making, personalized marketing, and click-and-collect.”
A great profile of the CEO of Automattic, the company that runs WordPress.com. “After we hung up our first Zoom call, Mullenweg sent me an email with the subject line “Freedom is central.” The body was a quote from Albert Camus, which worked as an explanation for just about everything Mullenweg believes in, fights for and plans to spend the rest of his life working on: “The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.”
The global semiconductor value chain. Today, I started my research into the world of semi-conductor and this is an excellent resource.
Stuff that I found interesting
Himalayan Glaciers Are Melting at Furious Rate, New Study Shows. “Glaciers across the Himalayas are melting at an extraordinary rate, with new research showing that the vast ice sheets there shrank 10 times faster in the past 40 years than during the previous seven centuries.”
Hospital Prices Are Unpredictable. One Type of Health Coverage Often Gets the Worst Rates. I said it before and I’ll say it again, the way that we have to live in fear of getting healthcare in this country is a disgrace
TikTok is the most visited domain in 2021, even more than Google.com. That’s impressive
Stats
YouTube TV is alleged to have more than 4 million subscribers
0.01% of bitcoin holders controls 27% of the currency in circulation
ACH made up 20% of non-cash payments in the U.S in 2020
Minh Quang Duong 