The Coming Transformation (8VC)

Summary

• The global economy will transform in the next decade into a digital global economy that requires different skills for workers and investors.§1
• Android is the best-selling smartphone platform in the world, with over 300 million devices in use and 850,000 activations every day.§2
• Total global mobile traffic will grow 26x between 2010 and 2015 (from .24 to 6.3 exabytes/month).§5
• In 2009, Asia Pacific was the world's largest mobile market, representing 57% of global mobile revenues.§5
• By 2015, the 2.14 billion mobile users in the Asia Pacific will grow to 2.89 billion.§5
• Mobile entertainment grows near 20% per year and is expected to reach $54 billion by 2014.§8
• Risk-reward favors valuable areas, such as old-line industries with deep operational inefficiencies, over popular areas with many copycat competitors.§9

Key insights

1. Family offices and private wealth managers hold wealth preservation as their primary goal and flock to supposedly safe investments.§2
2. Wealth stratification will grow, with much of the new wealth residing in illiquid investments rather than public equities.§3
3. IT advances have created a possibility-gap in business process efficiency larger than at any time since the nineteenth century.§4
4. Cooling demand in metropolitan Mumbai is equivalent to 24% of the cooling demand of the entire U.S.§6
5. Since 2001, U.S. old-economy retail has grown only 1.2%, while online retail grew at close to 20% per year.§8
6. The advertising domain shows a $50 billion dollar gap between time spent on mobile devices and money spent on mobile advertising.§8
7. Popular areas to avoid include communications, billing and payments, consumer investing and gaming.§9