The One Oasis Strategy is the proposition that if the best product drives key investments in a firm, it has the capacity to help other products in the business. Other products would feed from the best product, and overall, the company would flourish. Your best product is your one oasis; your business draws life from it, just as the oasis supports the inhabitants in a desert.
As you anchor critical investments to make the one oasis the best in the industry category, you need to have a double or multiple strategy to capture value out of it. It is symphonic like a great orchestra: the one oasis could be the known brand, but capturing value in the business could come from other areas.
In other words, most times, the brands which make companies popular are not where they generate most financial value. Amazon is known for ecommerce, but the bulk of its profits come from AWS. But without the ecommerce, AWS would not have been built. AWS is the play on Amazon’s one oasis which is the ecommerce!
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What is your one oasis? What are your plays to capture value from it? I wrote in Harvard how this strategy shapes my investment calls.
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Question: A member asked for the difference between One Oasis and Cash Cow?
Response by E.A.: “The concept is a bit different. Cash cow is a product or service that gives a lot of profit. One oasis may be a product or service that does not generate any profit but very vital to enable other products and services the company provides to make a lot of profit. Example Alibaba offers logistics at a loss to help Alipay grow. Amazon runs e-commerce at a loss because AWS is the goose that lays the golden eggs. This is possible because loss making e-commerce and logistics provides the critical number of people and data needed to drive other more profitable businesses.”
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What is Nigeria’s One Oasis Strategy? It needs to find one and build around it. Our investment in education doesn’t show any hint on what value we intend to capture from it.
We can try the strategy with Nigeria, since most companies here still don’t have clarity on why they are in business, the country provides plenty avenues to run experiments, it’s still morning here.