The seven industries Amazon will disrupt next
According to analyst firm CBInsights, the next targets for Amazon include the following:
The four industries certain to be disrupted by the Seattle giant:
- Pharmacies — Amazon has acquired Drugstore.com and PillPack. dis-rup-shun: Who is in trouble? Pharmacy middlemen (PBMs) and executives enjoying fat profits.
- Small business lending — Amazon knows the financial performance of thousands of small merchants that sell on Amazon.com. dis-rup-shun: Who is in trouble? Commercial and local banks.
- Online groceries — a notoriously difficult business, Amazon is now expert at both logistics and the retail grocery business from its Whole Foods acquisition. dis-rup-shun: Who is in trouble? Meal subscription services that charge a small premium for meal kits will find Amazon offering more choices for the same or less money.
- Payments — the company already owns Amazon Cash, Amazon Reload, Amazon Pay, and Amazon Prime Visa and will work hard to keep more deposits in Amazon accounts. dis-rup-shun: Who is in trouble? Visa, Mastercard and Paypal.
And the industries that may be disrupted by Amazon:
- Mortgages — getting approved for a mortgage is a cumbersome activity, therefore ripe for disruption, and Quicken Loans is the leader in fast, online mortgages. Amazon understands online selling. dis-rup-shun: Who is in trouble? Not only mortgage originators, but the archaic title companies.
- Home and Garden — several companies are shipping plants and garden kits to new home owners, and this is a supply chain business. dis-rup-shun: Who is in trouble? Amazon needs volume and the mail order plant business may not be very reliable, so Home Depot and Lowe’s will continue to be the go-to companies for lawn and garden.
- Insurance — Amazon has a great deal of information about its members, especially Prime members, and can use this data to determine who the better risks are. dis-rup-shun: Who is in trouble? Insurance providers who are not profiling subscribers based on available data and therefore are slow to target the best customers they wish to keep for many years
Ride hailing in China takes a step up
Alibaba (think Chinese Amazon) has created an aggregation service which enables ride hailers (330 million in China) to summon a ride from a single app, rather than compare ride availability across the four major rideshare providers’ apps. The aggregator takes a share of the fare and simplifies the process of both getting a ride and, if you are an emerging ride service, gaining scale. China is raising the required standards for accreditation of drivers and autos, creating a shortage of drivers. TechCrunch
dis-rup-shun: U.S. and European local governments will be wise to follow China with higher standards for drivers and autos, as the demand for more drivers has degraded the formerly consistently delightful Uber or Lyft experience. Taxis are now looking better than they have in five years as many yellow taxis are now cleaner and mechanically equal or better than the average ride share vehicle. Ride share vendors should offer a new class of premium ride, such as ‘Uber Certified,’ which ensures a clean, sound car and a preferred driver.
Waze data shortens emergence response time
It turns out that Waze users are so good about reporting accidents, that Waze learns about a crash 2 minutes and 41 seconds before emergency responders are notified. Wired
dis-rup-shun: Here is yet another example of crowd sourcing from private enterprise functioning better than a government entity’s best and most optimized emergency system. If a free app can provide more accurate emergency data than the tax-payer funded 911 emergency system, then should the public expect that Facebook’s proposed private currency, Libra, can provide better warnings of financial meltdown, fraud or theft than the Federal Reserve Bank? Makes you wonder.