In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule. Friedrich Nietzsche
Buffett is showing his contrarian views here by rejecting the conventional wisdom that Apple is the future and Kroger is the past. Additionally, Buffett is selling an expensive stock for cash. Mr. Market was paying $324.95 a share for Apple on 14 February 2020. I think Buffett thinks Mr. overprices Apple, and I agree.
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The risks Kroger is taking are great, but those risks are far smaller than the gamble Jeff Bezos took on robots. Amazon proves the fulfillment center and robot strategy works.
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Moreover Amazon is buying 20,000 Mercedes-Benz Sprinter vans from Daimler (OTC: DAI) for the third-party delivery network. In addition to vans, third-party delivery services get access to Amazon-branded uniforms, a fuel programs, and low-cost vehicle insurance.
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Like TJX, Wayfair succeeds because it stays below the radar, caters to loyal customers, and offers great bargains. Another similarity is that Wayfair, like TJX, caters to women.
That is a smart strategy because women are the main shoppers for home furnishings. I think this partially explains why the market ignores Wayfair. To explain, most of the commentators and traders in the stock market are men who have little interest in home furnishing.
Moreover, most of the “experts” in e-commerce are men. Hence, Wayfair is cashing in by targeting a neglected segment of the market. In particular, Amazon has only made a big push into home furnishings in recent years.
On the other hand, both Walmart and Amazon have noticed Wayfair’s success. Not surprisingly, both Walmart and Amazon are making big offensives into the home furnishings market. Thus, Wayfair’s current success could be temporary.
A Kroger/Walgreen hybrid is an obvious use of the capabilities provided by Ocado. A robotic fulfillment center could obviously support both Kroger supermarkets and Walgreen drugstores.
Moreover, a Walgreen drugstore is a logical addition to the 2,782 supermarkets Kroger operates. In addition, Kroger food brands like Simple Truth will be a logical addition to Walgreens inventory.
Importantly, Kroger operates 37 food manufacturing facilities across the United States. Therefore, Kroger offers Walgreens a source of low-priced food products to counter Amazon’s discounting.
Equally important is Kroger’s ability to provide hot takeout meals, meal kits, deli foods, and hot entrees to Walgreen. Markedly, Kroger has a good relationship with the delivery specialist Instacart.
Additionally, an obvious use for Instacart is delivery of Walgreens prescriptions. America’s growing legion of senior citizens will be obvious customers for prescription delivery.
Normally nobody would ask if a company that reported $122.662 billion in revenues last year can survive. We are not
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Therefore, Amazon’s ability to disrupt will remain as a long it generates vast amounts of cash. Jeff Bezos has not built a company he has created a disruption machine that thrives on chaos.
There are some potential threats to the disruption machine. The greatest of which is economic collapse.
Geography is the other limit on Amazon’s disruptive capabilities. There are only so markets it can disrupt.
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Delivery can destroy Sprouts because it keeps customers away from Sprouts where they can see its low prices.
Traditional supermarkets depend heavily from all the spur-of-the moment purchases from shoppers in the store. How many times have you walked into a supermarket to “grab a couple of things” and ended up pushing a full shopping cart out the door?
Online shoppers only get what is on their shopping list, because they are not in the supermarket to get tempted by that extra stuff. That is good for customers’ pocketbooks but bad for Sprouts’ bottom line.
The traditional supermarket is a marketing machine cleverly disguised as a food store. Grocers fill their stores with temptations such as endcaps, free samples, delis, and cafes. The online shopper sees none of that stuff.
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The next money-making frontier for NVIDIA is the cloud. The company’s new superfast HGX-2 chips are made to operate artificial intelligence (AI) in the cloud.
The potential market for the HGX-2 is vast because there were 390 web-scale data centers worldwide in December 2017, TechCrunch reported. That number increased by 90 to 390 in 2017 and it is expected to increase by around 100 again in 2018.
There are currently 24 hyperscale firms giant data-oriented companies like Alphabet (NASDAQ: GOOGL), Palintir, Tencent Holdings, IBM, etc. each of which operated around 16 data centers a piece, TechCrunch calculated. The average large datacenter contained around 5,000 servers.
Ocado claims to process 260,000 orders a week with an order accuracy rate of 99% and an on-time delivery rate of 95%. The company claims to reduce costs with a 0.7% rate of product waste, which sounds hard to believe.
What’s truly interesting is that Ocado might be ahead of Amazon in its use of robots to move groceries. Ocado claims to have 1,100 robots at work in its newest Customer Fulfillment Center (CFC3) in Andover, Hampshire. Pictures online show Ocado robots working in refrigerated warehouses and giant freezers.
Those robots can supposedly pick and pack an order of 50 items in just five minutes. That is amazing because the CFC3 is stocked with 50,000 items, and the center itself is the size of three football fields.