Jeffrey L. Funk wrote:
> Hello everyone,
> the percentage of profitable content businesses is a fairly meaningless
> number. there are always a large percentage of firms that don't make money
> particularly during the early years of an industry. for example, there were
> 75 manufacturers of automobiles in the US in 1925, most of whom were
> clearly not profitable.
I totally agree with Jeff! Here are some more numbers:
US Telegraph companies:
1855: 50 companies
1857: 6 companies
1866: 1 company dominates
US Railroads:
1920: 186 major railroad companies
1980: 39 major railroad companies
US Cars:
1908: 253 car companies
1920: 108 car companies
1929: 80% of cars are produced by Chrysler, Ford or GM
PCs:
1988: 45 PC companies
1993: 100 PC companies
2003: 51% of US market = Dell & HP
The mobile industry is in the early stage, and much consolidation
will come. As Jeff says, most of the i-mode industry will in the
long run not be selling ringing tones and cartoon characters, or
dating services of some kind. As I said in the previous email
selling of JR-Tokkai Shinkansen tickets at US$ 125 a pop is not
trivial, and it's off the DoCoMo balance sheet and off the DoCoMo
statistics, and the profits are probably hidden elsewhere in
JR-Tokkai's accounting. Their i-mode services even might appear
as a loss-making IT-cost-center in the accounting.
Gerhard
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Gerhard Fasol, PhD Eurotechnology Japan K. K.
fasol_at_eurotechnology.com http://www.eurotechnology.com/
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Received on Wed Aug 13 09:30:33 2003