Benedict Evans 2022, part 2

Every year at the start of the year, Benedict Evans produces a big presentation on trends in technology, internet, mobile, and so on. He used to live in the US and did this for Andreesen-Horowitz (a16z). But he has since returned to Britain (he's English) and I think has his own consulting company. This year's presentation is titled Three Steps to the Future. I cover the future and the present in yesterday's post. Today, it is the past, meaning:

TV

Everything the internet did to music and newspapers is now happening to everyone else

People just don't see it coming. Here's a quote from Jeff Bewkes, CEO of Time-Warner, talking about Netflix in 2010:

Is the Albanian army going to take over the world? I don't think so.

Of course, cord-cutting (canceling cable completely) has increased massively as people switch to streaming. I got rid of mine about 10 years ago.

A data point: for 18-34s in the UK, streaming from American companies is now bigger (in hours watched) than all UK TV channels put together (that BBC license fee is great value for these people...who don't watch it).

Retail

Lockdown has accelerated retail going online. With Amazon based in Seattle, you might assume that the US is leading the transition to online retail. But actually it is somewhat of a laggard. This graph compares UK with US. Excluding groceries, 40% of UK retail is now online.

Online retail has multiple delivery options:

• Parcels (Amazon, etc): Amazon spent $74B on shipping in the last 12 months and expects to be bigger than UPS or Fedex in 2022.
• Delivery (food)
• Bikes, etc (restaurants and dark kitchens): DoorDash, GrubHub, etc. UberEats made more money on this market than its taxi service last year.

Amazon (e-commerce) is on-track to overtake Walmart (car commerce) in 2022 or so. Amazon also has over $25B in ad revenue, perhaps more even than AWS.

But there is competition enabled by Canada-based Shopify that has been growing fast:

Brands are going digital, too. Who'd have thought that nearly 10% of Kellog's sales would be online? Let alone 30% of L'Oréal.

If you are not a teenager (or the parent of one), you might never have heard of Chinese-based Shein, which has come out of nowhere, mostly in the last couple of years, to become the leader in US fast fashion.

Conclusion

Here are the things that Ben left out in his presentation. As he puts it:

When software is eating the world, everything becomes a software question.

There is a major transition that we are in the middle of, as tech transitions to be a system part of society.

Tech used to sell accounting tools to big companies...now it's part of our life.

See the Whole Presentation

You can see the whole presentation (which contains a lot more than I've included here) on Ben's website.

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