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Canada is the prime example of this phenomenon. Rogers, Bell, and Telus are the three companies that own or acquire nearly every internet/mobile/tv property in
by transcriptase 1y ago
Canada is the prime example of this phenomenon.
Rogers, Bell, and Telus are the three companies that own or acquire nearly every internet/mobile/tv property in the entire country. They all offer the exact same plans at the exact same prices, moving in lockstep almost down to the hour when new price or benefit surfaces.
Similarly banking is dominated by the big 5 who don’t really compete as far as the average customer is concerned.
In many regions groceries are dominated by two companies, while nationally the entire market basically consists of five or so.
And because Canadian pension plans and ETFs are so heavily invested in these select few companies, they trudge along with virtually no incentive to upset the status quo because the government finds it easier to oversee oligopolies than allow competition to benefit the populace.
- com2kid 1y agoYou are giving examples of markets where goods and services are commodified. Cellular technology between providers is basically identical now. The nightmare that all cellular providers dreaded, becoming a dumb data pipeline, has happened. Value add services are dead across the board. Telus has a profit margin of around 4%, what sort of innovation are you expecting with those financials?
- transcriptase 1y agoSure. Let’s just pretend collusion and price gouging hadn’t been going on for over 20 years, while the big 3 including Telus assimilated all independently owned competitors and until about 2020 maintained the most absurdly expensive and profitable mobile plans on earth while claiming it was due to infrastructure costs which were actually being subsidized by taxpayers. Oh and while the regulatory body that was supposed to keep them in check, staffed nearly exclusively by former Telus, Rogers, and Bell higher-ups, rubber stamped acquisitions and actively prevented foreign competitors from threatening the gravy train in conjunction with propaganda campaigns from incumbents. Get fucking real. Which one did you work for?
- com2kid 1y agoCell companies suck, yes. And a decade ago they sucked more, and 2 decades ago it was really fucked. But they got commoditized. They are a utility provider now, they can't charge an arm and a leg for tethering or photos in messages. Their profit margins are garbage and they have to spend a shit ton of money to deploy new tech to maintain those shit margins. The writing has been on the wall for decades that this was coming，which is why they acted like such dicks to try and keep it from happening.
- conorcleary 1y agoI bet they could get way more than 4% profit margin if things actually were lean in their supply chain. Any publicly-traded company has hangers-on all the way up and down - buddies overcharging services rendered but put through the ringer a dozen times creating lots of jobs (then shrinking it directly into profit via some other vendor's AI scam). Something like Mint comes along or Koodo that can actually charge less (Teksavvy) then they get bullied, lobbied against, or straight up bought to be shut down or enshitificated
- Zigurd 1y agoHow does one calculate a reliable profit margin for a product that has zero incremental costs for delivering another unit of the product? Forgive my cynicism for thinking that the cost of acquisitions and other financial shenanigans is factored into what's called the profit margin for those businesses.