经济学人下载:熊彼特企业管理专栏--零售杂货店电商之争(1)

Business
来源于《商业》版块

Schumpeter
熊彼特企业管理专栏

Tomato catch-up
番茄，快点走，再不快点就变成番茄酱了

Ocado wages a grocery war against Amazon, Walmart and Alibaba
Ocado与亚马逊、沃尔玛和阿里巴巴的杂货大战

Panic is sweeping through supermarket aisles. Profits are meagre, convenience is king, discounters are rife. Even Amazon, Walmart and Alibaba, the world’s three biggest retailers, are trembling. No one has fully mastered the art of selling groceries online. The business represents just 2.3%, or $160bn, of a worldwide grocery market of $7trn. As that share rises, as it will surely continue to, it could be life or death for some in the industry.
恐慌席卷了超市过道。利润微薄、便利至上、折扣商店盛行。甚至连全球最大的三家零售商——亚马逊、沃尔玛和阿里巴巴都惶惶不安。没有哪家完全掌握在线销售杂货的艺术。在线销售仅占全球7万亿美元杂货市场的2.3%，即1600亿美元。随着这一比例的上升(当然还会继续上升)，对一些业内人士来说，这可能是生死攸关的大事。

In the midst of this mêlée is a fast-talking Brit, Tim Steiner. The firm he co-founded, Ocado, has shaken up the British online retail market, and it is trying to do the same internationally. By selling expertise from almost 20 years as a pioneering online grocer to supermarkets in America and elsewhere, he wants to help them become a fourth force in the industry—able to resist the big three.
一位花言巧语的英国人提姆·施坦纳（Ocado的CEO、创始人之一）正处于这行混乱之间。他与人共同创立的公司Ocado已经撼动了英国的在线零售市场，并试图在国际上做同样的事情。他希望通过向美国和其他地方的超市出售自己在网上经营杂货近20年的经验，帮助他们成为这个行业的第四股力量——能够抵抗三巨头。

His patter is honed by a career battling doubters (an analyst once put him down with the quip: “Ocado begins with an ‘o’, ends with an ‘o’, and is worth zero”). Sceptics still harbour deep reservations. Though Ocado has more than tripled in value in the past two years to £7.5bn ($9.6bn), its share price has plunged recently. But his insurgency shows how the battle to dominate online groceries remains wide open. Ocado has as good a chance as anyone.
他的口头禅是在职业生涯中与怀疑者的斗争中磨练出来的（一位分析师曾用一句俏皮话来反驳他：“Ocado以o开头，以o结尾，价值为0”)。持怀疑态度的人仍持保留态度。尽管Ocado的市值在过去两年中增长了两倍多，达到75亿英镑（合96亿美元），但其股价最近大幅下跌。但提姆·施坦纳的叛乱表明，争夺在线杂货业主导权的战斗仍在继续。Ocado和其他竞争者一样有机会。