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With Essential, 'Already a Unicorn', Andy Rubin Wants To Disrupt the Apple-Samsung 'Duopoly' (cnet.com)
Bloomberg reported on Wednesday that Essential, Andy Rubin's new startup, has added $300 million to its war chest as it looks to break into the highly competitive field of consumer electronics. The financing round valued Essential at $900 million to $1 billion, according to an analysis by Equidate, which runs a market for private company stock. In an interview, Rubin, who created Android, shared how the company plans to move forward: "I think when there's this duopoly with these two guys owning 40 percent of the market, this complacency sets in," Rubin said. "And that's the perfect time to start a company with this. Some people are complacent and it needs to be disrupted."
Of course the company is worth $1 billion dollars. If Andy Rubin sneezed, and three top hedge fund managers agreed that his snot could potentially cure cancer, they would be able to sell shares in his snot for $1 billion dollars. When interest rates are being supported at nominally negative rates by a central banking system beholden to the rich, the only investment that is a bad one is an investment so grounded in reality that it cannot be blown into a giant bubble.
Money is becoming worthless to those who have it, and unobtainable to those who don't. It's a different sort of monetary system failure from Weimer/Zimbabwe, and the high inflation of the 1980s, but it is probably going to end in a big mess none the less.
Take any business concept and there are duopolies. What happens is that two large companies take about 90% of the market share and the other 10% is split among a bunch of other smaller companies. Target/Walmart -> smaller versions like your corner store that sells movies, food and random electronics like USB chargers Lowes/Home Depot -> smaller versions exist all over the place and some are regional iOS/Android -> BB10, Windows and maybe a few others Even airlines are slowly consolidating. That's what happens when there are to many players. Consolidation happens till you have 1 or 2 major players and a few outliers. This guy is an idiot if he thinks that he can displace Samsung. He'll just get like 0.1% of the Android market if he is lucky.
If he wanted to do something disruptive then he would have made a phone with a removable battery or one that actually lasts for a week. What we really have here is just another Android phone.
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With a billion dollars they'll do nothing. Samsung's market cap is a quarter of a trillion dollars. Apple is at 800 billion. They'd better be really creative. If they're creative enough, Apple might buy them.