"Rakuten Ichiba is Japan’s single largest online retail marketplace. It also provides loyalty points and e-money usable at hundreds of thousands of stores, virtual and real. It issues credit cards to tens of millions of members. It offers financial products and services that range from mortgages to securities brokerage. And the company runs one of Japan’s largest online travel portals—plus an instant-messaging app, Viber, which has some 800 million users worldwide. Retailer? Financial company? Rakuten Ichiba is all that and more!"
Competing in a world of sectors without borders McKinsey Quarterly July 2017
I examined this in "Siemens, Philips & GE -digital transformers?"
In another article I questioned who will own industry stacks prompted by
- auto manufacturers investing in uber style companies (Jaguar Land Rover and Lyft)
- Tesla bundling insurance with cars
- Software vendors driving autonomous cars and trucks
See "Autonomous cars may change the source of insurance innovation
These boundary changes are the catalyst to digital disrupters challenging analoge incumbents. Who owns the industry stack owns the industry!
See "Digital transformation and industry stacks"
As boundaries between industry sectors continue to blur, CEOs—many of whose companies have long commanded large revenue pools within traditional industry lines—will face off against companies and industries they never previously viewed as competitors. This new environment will play out by new rules, require different capabilities, and rely to an extraordinary extent upon data. Defending your position will be mission critical, but so too will be attacking and capturing the opportunities across sectors before others get there first. To put it another way: within a decade, companies will define their business models not by how they play against traditional industry peers but by how effective they are in competing within rapidly emerging “ecosystems,” comprising a variety of businesses from dimensionally different sectors.