Amazon has been growing from strength to strength over the past few years with its diversified range of products and services. Now, Amazon has become the second company in the world to hit $1 trillion in valuation, joining Apple which hit the landmark recently. The story becomes our top feature in this week’s subscription roundup. We then shift the lens to Amazon’s arch rival, Walmart, which is testing a new delivery service to counter Amazon Flex. Lastly, we look at how OTT businesses have disrupted telcos and explore ways in which telcos can wrest back the initiative.
Amazon becomes the second company to hit $1 trillion market cap
In a strong vote of confidence from Wall Street, Amazon has become the second company to hit the trillion dollar valuation, following hot on the heels of
Apple. While it didn’t stay there for long (having fallen back to $974 billion market cap at the time of writing), the milestone shows the dominance of Amazon fuelled by its strong e-commerce and cloud services, combined with its fast-growing subscription revenues through Amazon Prime. Can it overtake Apple to become the most valuable company in the world?
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here
Walmart tests new grocery delivery service to counter Amazon Flex
Walmart is testing a new service called Spark Delivery that allows independent drivers to make grocery deliveries. The program is very similar to Amazon Flex, which allows drivers to use their own cars to deliver groceries to end users. Spark Delivery is a crowdsourced platform which includes a partnership with Delivery Drivers Inc, a separate company that manages these independent drivers.
Read more
here
Can telcos conquer the OTT stronghold?
TT services like WhatsApp, Spotify and Netflix have eaten into traditional telco revenues by offering better communication, messaging and media services. Many of these OTT players leverage subscription business models which have proven extremely popular with end users. Businesses also benefit with the predictable revenue stream guaranteed through
subscription billing. Will we see more telecom businesses launching their own OTT services?
Read more
here
Also read:
Microsoft launches unique subscription plan for Xbox