When you look at intra-African trade, remittance startups do not pay a lot of attention to it. Why hire staff to facilitate trade between Nigeria and Gambia? Why waste all the efforts to build structures to make it easier for Ethiopia to trade with Gabon? Yes, the volume of the trade is small. Indeed, in the grand scheme of business, it is very hard to make money when there is no money available to be made.
Think of helping someone to find a job when there are no jobs! In that thinking, remittance companies focus on the US & Europe-Africa route because that handles more than 90% of the remittance transactions. The route between Mali and Gabon is a distraction, unfortunately.
Take that thinking to Apple, the rich dude ecosystem: Apple is now worth more than Facebook (Meta), Google (Alphabet) and Amazon combined. As inflation battles the every-customer ecosystem of Amazon, Facebook and Google, Apple users have tons of money in their bank accounts to spend. Indeed, at the top of the pyramid, they are not feeling the pains as those at the lower part of the pyramid.
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At the same time, the market caps of its three tech giant peers added up to $2.306 trillion at the close of trading Wednesday. Google parent Alphabet’s market cap stood at $1.126 trillion, Amazon’s at $939.78 billion and Facebook parent Meta’s at $240.07 billion, Yahoo Finance data showed.
Overall, Big Tech stocks suffered a brutal selloff last week on the back of disappointing quarterly earnings. But Apple’s stock has outperformed its peers after it beat Wall Street’s revenue and profit forecasts for its fourth quarter.
What is your market positioning? You get 10 clicks from Facebook, none hits the BUY button. But you get 4 from LinkedIn and you get a sale. Make sure you are reaching the right customers.
Like Apple, Starbucks makes coffee which the upper class enjoys: “Rising prices aren’t keeping consumers from splurging on coffee. Starbucks reported record quarterly sales Thursday, notching $8.4 billion in revenue and a 7% rise in global same-store sales compared with last year. That number was higher in the U.S. — 11% — as Americans boosted their spending even as inflation continued to squeeze budgets. Though wage increases and training costs amid a chain-wide revamp cut into Starbucks’ store-level profit, interim CEO Howard Schultz says demand is strong.”
At $2.307trn, Apple Now Worth More Than Alphabet (Google), Amazon and Meta (Facebook) Combined
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