Lidl owner Schwarz Group has a standalone unit that offers cloud computing to corporate customers. This unit, which generated €1.9bn in annual sales in 2023, has signed up clients including Germany’s biggest software group SAP and the country’s most successful football club Bayern Munich and the port of Hamburg.
Business & Brands
Limeseat change(from pod)
Louis Vuitton is one of few brands that never discounts products. “Items advertised as discounted on the Web are invariably fake,” it states online. This is a smart decision for the luxury brand, which realises that doing so retains the value of the products while sending the confident message that the original price is exactly as it should be.
Bag logos no longer ther
Car brands create status. In a study on dating website HotOrNot.com, three pictures showed the same man with the same background – the only thing that changed was the car he was next to. The more expensive the car, the higher his rating.
CHECK IN THE CONTEXT OF ALL CAR COMPANIESThe company, which manufactures jet engines, reported a £5.4 billion loss in the first half of 2020. A ruthless
The world’s largest hotel corporation owns very few hotels. Instead, Marriott makes money by selling its brand to franchisees, who then set up Marriot branded hotels and pay an annual fee in return.
The need for speed led the McDonald brothers to turn to Henry Ford and the world of cars. If Ford could use a specialised system to build a car in two hours, the McDonald brothers could use it to make a burger in less than a minute. They created a new dispenser that squirted the same amount of ketchup every time, and they replaced the silverware with paper wrappings to remove the need for a space-consuming dishwasher. The resulting ‘Speedee System’ became the basis for modern day fast food as we know it.
McDonald’s is essentially a real estate company, making billions in rent from franchised restaurants.
Mcdonalds speedee system (see film)
Morrisons freezer
Reed Hastings, with no prior experience of the film and television industry, applied the gym-model of subscription to movie rentals to create Netflix.
Reed Hastings decided to start Netflix after being fined $40 at a Blockbuster store for being late to return a copy of Apollo 13.
Netflix shows are not made equal. As the company’s recent viewing report states, “the top 1 percent of titles accounted for about 22.32 billion hours of viewing, almost 24 percent of the total. The top 10 percent brought in 68 percent of all viewing – 64.16 billion hours.”
The New York Times is now a gaming company (in terms of time spent by users).