Price competition with commodiised products is not a fun place to be. Lexmark is throwing in the towell on inkjets and will focus on laser printers. This links to the story about HP and Dell struggling to make money on commodity PCs while Apple changes the market and the margins. Michael Porter’s Five Forces are…
Should South Africa import Chinese television sets? Your answer to this question depends probably on your education. If you were university educated in South Africa, you are likely to be in the market at various times in your life for a large LED backlit LCD panel with a high refresh rate and more HDMI inputs…
Some interesting thoughts on what drives Germany’s apparent success. The article does understate the problem that Germany’s success is significantly export driven – not everyone can export for obvious reasons. Also, the author notes that consumption has grown more slowly than economic growth without understanding that is exactly the source of an export-encouraged boom. Growth…
The Consumer Protection Act (CPA) protects consumers from abuse by enforcing fair practices, improved disclosure and added minimum warranties etc, It’s a good piece of legislation, even if at times some aspects of it may result in greater costs than benefits. TimesLive has a story about the alleged noncompliance of medical schemes with the CPA.…
I don’t know enough about book publishing and distribution to evaluate this properly, but it doesn’t seem right. Freakonomics reports that according to the US Authors’ Guild, authors will be worse off while publishers will be better off comparing ebooks to hard covers. When I say “doesn’t seem right” I’m referring mostly to the fairness…
It seems the taxi industry is unhappy with the proposed AARTO rules where traffic law infringements will earn drivers demerit points and eventually possibly licence suspension. One of the reasons given is: Satawu previously warned that Aarto will result in job losses, as drivers will lose their licences once the maximum amount of demerit points…
I hope Make A Million’s systems are playing up. Â Otherwise some players are losing more money than I ever expected.
According to a Fin24 story this morning, the FSB is probing smaller unit trusts. The economics of a fund manager depends entirely on growing funds under management so that revenues (based on assets under management) grow to be larger than costs (significantly fixed and at most semi-variable). Details of performance fees and the second order…
