Outlook: These sectors will be hit hard over the next 24 months

The questions I am asked most often are undoubtedly those that revolve around the future disruption of industries. The upheavals in the music and film industry, in mobile telephony, in fashion retail and currently in the automotive sector are both interesting and tragic. And the pace is accelerating.

(Reading time 5 minutes)

Tragic

These upheavals are tragic because the established players regularly behave in the same way:

First they sleep, then they negate, later they accept and panic and in the end everyone else is to blame.

Of course, this is a little exaggerated, but it’s not that wrong. As a fashion retailer, you could see very early on just from the demographic data where the journey in fashion retail was heading. I remember a presentation by Kai Hudetz a few years ago in which he simply shifted the willingness of different age groups to buy online into the future on the timeline.

It is these simple three-sentence milkmaid calculations that clearly show what was and still is to come. You don’t need digital readiness/awareness studies for this. On the contrary. Perhaps it is precisely this flood of studies that prevents the average manager from applying common sense to data that is freely available everywhere.

Interesting

The whole thing is interesting for the same reasons that it is tragic. It is now relatively easy to make certain predictions regarding the disruption of certain industries. The difficult thing is to put this into reliable time frames. For example, who would have seriously thought 3 years ago that electromobility would be the de facto future standard across the industry by the end of 2016?

Industries

If we look at individual sectors, several stand out that will obviously see new models in the near future. The following are ripe candidates for me:

Retail and online pure players

This combination looks a little strange at first glance, I admit it. Anyone who reads here often knows that I don’t believe in online vs. offline customers. We all buy in different ways and will continue to do so.

In the future, the player who can offer the best customer experience online and offline will win. I think the pure players have come a long way, but in traditional retail we have been stuck in terms of customer experience for decades. There are no new concepts. Many things are still just as laborious as they were in the 80s. I believe that a new player who masters online and implements new stationary concepts and thus fundamentally improves shopping across the board, yes, the world belongs to them in retail. And no, serving espresso in a clothes store is not a fundamental improvement.

At the moment, there are many indications that this will be Amazon. However, a new player also has a good chance if it has enough money to play with.

Healthcare

Anyone who has spent any length of time in a hospital will have noticed this: It is fundamentally poorly organized and inefficient. Compare hospital operations with a factory: it’s like making screws by hand, for example. And before a dozen people write to me now and try to convince me that people are not screws. No. I’m not talking about personal contact when I think things should be better organized. I mean everything else. I don’t know of any other industry that is so caught up in analogies as the healthcare industry.

The operation is incredibly inefficient and costs us a great deal, not least because of this. The cost pressure will become immense in the future, quite simply because the population cannot afford such medicine.

This creates an environment in which start-ups can find their niche. Switzerland is predestined for a new type of private hospital chain. Here, too, a lot of capital is required. However, the potential is enormous.

Insurances

I believe that we will see upheavals in the insurance industry over the next 24 months. On the one hand, traditional insurance sales are practically at an end, which is already being addressed. Secondly, the data on which insurance companies base their calculations will change rapidly in the future. We will simply have a lot more data. As an insurer, the winners in the future will be those who can offer “targeted” insurance. In other words, those who are close to the data and can keep it as personalized as possible will offer products that cannot be beaten with conventional calculations.