Retail

On June 16, 2017, at 9:01 am ET, Amazon announced its agreement to acquire Whole Foods Market for $13.7B. Four minutes later, Walmart announced its agreement to acquire online brand Bonobos for $310M. While the announcements were coincidental, the strategies…

Halo Sport Headset | $499 | A pair of headphones that utilizes neuropriming to improve workouts. Apple Watch Series 4 | $499 | Fall detection, an electrocardiogram, super-accurate fitness tracking, and cell connectivity make it the best smartwatch period. Plae Shoes |…

Written by guest author Carlos Castelán with Andrew Murphy. Carlos is Managing Director of The Navio Group. There’s an old Sun Tzu quote that speaks to the power of a winning mindset: “Victorious warriors win first and then go to…

We pride ourselves on contrarian curiosity. When that curiosity leads us to new conclusions, we change our minds. As part of that exploration, the areas that we find most interesting evolve over time. What was once frontier eventually becomes commonplace.…

Amazon has reached a $1 trillion market cap for two reasons. First, the company has a relentless focus on “delighting the customer.” Second, Jeff Bezos has investor support to run Amazon for the long-term at the cost of near-term profitability, allowing…

We’ve recently studied Apple retail and believe it is an underappreciated competitive advantage. No other tech company has Apple’s base of 65,000 retail employees delivering face to face advice, support, and experiences. Microsoft comes in second with about 6,000 retail…

We’re investing in Skupos as a play on our vision of the future of retail. Skupos’ real-time inventory data fundamentally changes the game for convenience stores (c-stores), distributors, and brands. Automated retail and same day delivery are the future of commerce, and…

We asked Siri, Google Assistant, Alexa, and Cortana 800 questions each. This time, Google Assistant was able to answer 86% of them correctly vs. Siri at 79%, Alexa at 61%, and Cortana at 52%. As part of our ongoing effort…

Amazon Prime Day — one of Amazon’s greatest inventions — starts on Monday, June 16th at 12 PM PT. Prime Day 2018 will last 36 hours (+6 hours y/y) and will be available in 17 countries (4 more than last…

As we hit the halfway point of 2018, we wanted to check in on one of our boldest predictions for the year: Amazon will acquire Target in 2018. So far, we’ve been wrong. Getting the timing correct is difficult, and every…

Optionality around new product and service categories is the 4th and final pillar to our Apple as a Service thesis. We expect a stable iPhone business (part 1), a growing Services segment (part 2), and capital returns (part 3) to…

CNBC reported on Friday that Amazon is building a health and wellness team inside its Alexa division to work on making Alexa a better tool for healthcare. Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway, and JP Morgan recently announced plans for a joint healthcare company focused on…