Tsion's Profile

I also love ASOS. I was introduced to it a few years ago by my coworker/friend and haven’t been disappointed with my purchases.

I’m also surprised to learn that they only have one central distribution center, which is even more impressive considering how fast their shipments arrive. Given, our enthusiasm for ASOS, I’m curious to know about their financial performance relative to their competitors.
Secondly, since ASOS sells hundreds of other brands as well as its own, How does it balance between promoting their in-house brands vs. external brands? Lastly, it will be interesting to know if ASOS would ever distribute its own brand through other online retail outlets.

As a regular customer of Uber, I agree that Uber has effectively capitalized on service gap that affected a large number of people. However, I disagree that Uber drivers are as better off as advertised. For example, if you look at the black car service, the driver bare all the cost upfront cost of purchasing expensive cars, servicing fees, insurance charges and all licensing fees. Yes, indeed Uber provides the platform to get customers but it shifted all the risk of actually operating the business to drivers without having to provide them safety nets.

My second point is around surge pricing. The surge is a good way to optimize supply and demand but at what point doest it become excessive? For example, during a snow storm a couple of years ago in NYC, the surge was more than 10x. I wonder if Uber is now limiting how high the surge pricing goes after getting a lot of bad press during that time.

Thank you for an interesting post on Costco.

I was surprised to learn that Costco’s margin’s were that much lower than that of Walmart’s. With that being said, I’m not sure how sustainable the business model would be in to the future. Similar to the other commentaries, my concern is that Costco has not yet addressed the younger generation and the move of millennial into urban areas. Given competitors like Amazon and Big Box as mentioned above, I would be curious to learn if Costco is developing an e-commerce strategy. Do you think this would be a viable option to address the younger and urban consumers?

Yes, I do agree with you that the charge time is an issue that Tesla must address in the future. Even though the battery swap program didn’t gain as much acceptability, Tesla might be able to leverage its new mega factory to come up with a solution. Another alternative would be to maybe leverage solar energy, it would be interesting to see if they would use solar energy to compliment the batter life.

I don’t know too much about hydrogen cars, but I think Tesla’s mission is to increase competition in the auto industry that’s alternative to the traditional internal combustion engines. If hydrogen cars are indeed superior to electric cars, I don’t see why Tesla wouldn’t create the next generation of hydrogen cars as well.

Yes, you are right the Roadster is the first model but it was discontinued before a wide market acceptance. Today, Tesla only sells the Model S until the release of the Model X. Since the Model S is Tesla’s first widely distributed model so I chose to focus on that. Secondly, the Model X is indeed an a crossover SUV. I don’t think I mention that it’s a sedan, I just mention that it’s the second design. As far as superchargers’ go I wasn’t aware about the emails Tesla’s sends but I do believe that there’s still room for improvement in terms of accessibility and the time it takes to charge as mentioned below in the Jorge’s comment.
As far as the quality issues, you bring up a very good point. Even though they had a set back, I believe Tesla is still positioned to overcome some of these quality issues because of its open communication platform with customers. Also, Tesla has strong brand loyalty that it will be able to come out on top, the over subscription of the Model X could be sited as a good indicator of this royalty. Lastly, only a month after the negative reports, Consumer Report the magazine “awarded one version of the car the all-wheel-drive Tesla Model S P85D 103 points, a tally so high it broke the Consumer Reports road-test ratings system. Its driving performance was better than any other vehicle the magazine has evaluated.” according to an LA times article that discussed the issues. http://www.latimes.com/business/autos/la-fi-hy-consumer-reports-tesla-models-20151020-story.html