Ged Carroll

Search results for: “hi-fi”

  • Sennheiser HD 25 Light

    The Sennheiser HD 25 Light is a modern marvel of design that can trace its history back as far as 1968. German headphone company Sennheiser started making a range of headphones that would become iconic.

    Sennheiser HD 25 light

    How we got the Sennheiser HD 25 light

    Founded in the immediate aftermath of the second world war, Sennheiser quickly built up a reputation in professional broadcast and recording circles with its microphones. In 1968 Sennheiser launched the HD 414, which was made sturdy plastic mouldings and a highly adjustable headband , attached to light on-ear headphones. The HD 414 set a design philosophy that the Sennheiser HD 25 Light continues on.

    This was back when most headphones were bulky ‘cans’ a la vintage Koss models. They would weigh on the listener during a long listening session. The Sennheiser HD 414 by comparison was light and easy to wear while providing an open accurate sound.

    My first foray into hi-fi as a teenager was buying a pair of HD 414s from Richer Sounds. By that time Sennheiser had a full range of headphones, many of which were lighter and more modern looking than anything else on the market, especially when compared to AKG, Beyerdynamic or Sony.

    Sennheiser had started making pilot headsets for Lufthansa in 1980 and had developed a good understanding of sound isolation.

    Sony MDR-V6 and MDR-7500 series.

    When I started DJing, I aspired to own a pair of Sony MDR-V6 launched in 1985 and only discontinued in 2020. These live on through the Sony MDR-7500 series.

    These had a reputation for sound quality, good sound isolation, were robust and less bulky than their European rivals. They still weighed in at 230+ grams which could be a bit wearing after several hours. This was the rival that Sennheiser had to beat, and when they were launched Japan and Sony were at their peak.

    However, the things hi-fi and sound recording magazines don’t tell you about them

    Over the longer term, the vinyl trim on the Sony headphones would start to flake and they weren’t designed to be user-serviceable. Finally, even if you were inclined to repair and maintain them, Sony wouldn’t sell you the parts (in the UK at least.) 12 months of regularly DJing with them and they were needed new ear pads and a headband.

    Later on I would go to video shoots and see sound recordists with Sonys which had gaffer-taped headbands and ear pads that looked rat bitten.

    1988

    1988 was a pivotal year, Mr and Mrs Danny Rampling were running Shoom out of a gym in Southwark, Paul Oakenfold was running similar nights in the backroom of Richard Branson‘s Heaven nightclub underneath Charing Cross station. Up North, the Hacienda was hosting the Zumbar and Hot.

    All of which were pivotal in the rise of house music and nightlife culture for the following four decades. This in turn drove sales of professional DJ equipment including the Made 2 Fade family of mixers and Technics SL-1200 series turntables. Record shops sprang up on the high street catering to this audience, the kind of frequency only seen with Turkish barber shops now.

    What was lost in all that cultural change was the launch of the Sennheiser HD 25. The Sennheiser HD 25 (1) when it was released was aimed at broadcast users in outdoor settings and sound recorders on a film, TV or advertising shoot.

    It had the robust build quality and lightness of the HD 414, and sat on the ear in a similar manner which allowed for hours of very comfortable listening. There was a split head rest which helped keep the head ventilated while listening and spread the load. It had clutter free cabling which borrowed from Sennheiser’s experience making headsets for pilots, along with good sound isolation.

    The frame had a special bracket that allowed an ear cup to be pivoted off your ear, making them ideal for DJs.

    Finally it was easy to power as a headset thanks to aluminium voice coils that drew on Sennheiser’s heritage making professional microphones for broadcast and studio usage.

    The Sennheiser HD 25 (1) when it was released was aimed at broadcast users in outdoor settings and sound recorders on a film, TV or advertising shoot and it took a while for DJs to discover it.

    Being aimed at professional users Sennheiser designed them to be user serviceable. You can still buy all the parts AND there is a good third party community making parts for them as well.

    Concorde

    By the early 1990s, the Sennheiser HD 25 family of headphones comprised of the Sennheiser HD-25 (1) and the Sennheiser HD 25 SP – which is the direct forerunner of the Sennheiser HD 25 Light.

    The headphones caught the attention of British Airways who were looking for passenger headphones that matched the noisy but premium experience of flying on Concorde. Sennheiser built a simplified version with adaptions to match the onboard audio system drawing from the HD 25 and the vintage HD 414 headband design known as the HD 25 BA.

    This then set the foundation for Sennheiser to design the HD 25 SP as a simplified version of the HD 25. The HD 25 SP didn’t need to have a high level of impedance match the aircraft audio system, so it could be a lot easier to power.

    What’s impressive about the Sennheiser HD 25 range is how little they’ve changed over the four decades they’ve been in production. There has been a slight improvement with the HD 25 (2) and the HD 25 Pro – which gave users a coiled cable and optional velour ear pads (recommended). Most of the other variants have been either limited editions more about marketing than sound, and some brand collaborations notably an adidas edition with three stripes and blue ear pads.

    The Sennheiser HD 25 Light was a revamp of the HD 25 SP. The differences were:

    A different headband design that modernised the vintage HD 414 inspired headband design. It connects to the back of the earphone the same as the HD 25, allowing it to use the same drivers as its big brother.

    Sennheiser HD 25 Light

    So what are they like and why am I talking about them? I got a pair of the Sennheiser HD 25 Light because I was doing more video calls in crowded spaces and wanted an on ear headphone that would work. It wasn’t hard to know what I wanted. If am listening to music or an audiobook in bed I use a pair of HD 25 headphones. They are very detailed even on low volume and ideal because falling off the bed does no damage to them at all.

    I could have gone with a pair of gamer headphones, but they are overly bulky and their sound is tuned for Call of Duty rather than than video calls, podcasts and electronica. I found that they tend to get warm when you’re wearing them on two back-to-back calls and a three-hour virtual workshop. Lastly they come with LED lighting and controls that I don’t need.

    So my solution was simple a pair of HD 25 Lights and a third party cable that had a built-in microphone. They sound similar to the the HD 25 like you would expect, the slight differences I think are down to the slightly different fit of the headband affecting they way they sit against my ear and the third party audio cable.

    Calls are clear and detailed as is most type of music with more detail than the Shure IEMs that I previously wore all the time. I have a few hacks planned for the headset:

    A hard case cover to keep all my audio bits together lint and dust-free in my bag as much as protect the headphones

    A smidge of Sugru as reinforcement at the joint between the headphone jack and the cable to reinforce it. I do the same on the power cable for my laptop where the cable meets the MagSafe adapter. It’s less hassle to deal with than the blocks of epoxy putty that plumbers use and comes in more manageable amounts.

    The Shure IEMs are still fine for talking calls on the move and listening to podcasts on the tube, while the Sennheiser HD 25 Light headphones take over my office work.

  • Zing + more things

    Zing

    HSBC’s Zing shuts down. It didn’t manage to compete effectively against Revolut and Wise. Zing provided cheap foreign exchange. On the face of it HSBC had a number of use cases in its main retail banking markets that would have made sense.

    Hong Kong:

    • 7+ percent of the population are expats. This has been pretty constant over previous decades, though people are constantly coming and departing. A big group of these communities are domestic workers from the Philippines, Indonesia, Myanmar and Sri Lanka. All of whom would benefit from cheap foreign money transfers.
    • Like other developed Asian countries, many young Hong Kongers study abroad. Having a way to cheaply transfer money to and from Hong Kong would be useful for this second group.
    • Finally Hong Kong has a diaspora, with families being spread across the United Kingdom, Australia and Canada.

    UK:

    • 30+ percent of Londoners were born outside the UK. Overall, the UK had ethnic minorities which make up 8 – 10 percent of the population. Many of them have multi-generational links with their homelands.
    • The NHS in particular has a large proportion of skilled foreigners working for them from Filipino intensive care nurses to Greek X-ray technicians.

    Zing decided to launch only in the UK. Despite HSBC’s footprint, it didn’t grab the visibility or market share achieved by Revolut or Wise. It also failed to make money and HSBC seems to have taken a shorter term view to succeed or quit compared to its startup competitors. One could charitably view Zing as a correct view of the ‘fast failure’ model, if learnings from it are taken from it by HSBC and applied effectively.

    Zing shutdown

    Zing is emblematic of Clayton Christensen’s Innovator’s Dilemma where established companies lose market share as they fail to disrupt themselves to compete against new upstart businesses.

    Financial innovation is hard. Barclays closed down their mobile payment system Pingit, NatWest stepped back from its digital bank offering and Vodafone has struggled to expand M-Pesa.

    Beauty

    SkinGPT – hyper-realistic skin simulations powered by GenAI

    China

    US TikTok ‘refugees’ make surprise move to China’s ‘RedNote’ | FT – Xiaohongshu’s technical team were not ready for the complexity of a western audience. What’s interesting is that the move was a political statement to US politicians and a tacit rejection of Meta’s competitor platforms very soon after their ‘pivot to free speech’.

    Economics

    Gen Z Americans are leaving their European cousins in the dust | FT

    Energy

    Toyota rethinks its bet on hydrogen | FT – renewed focus on commercial vehicles that will help drive the build out of hydrogen infrastructure.

    Gadget

    Honda, Sony launch Afeela with microLED external display | EE News Europe – showcased at CES

    Vintage | Hi-Fi News – modern reviews on classic hi-fi models that give you a realistic understanding about how they compare to the current state-of-the-art. A number of the pieces come off much more favourably than I was expecting.

    Obsolete Sony are doing a great job at documenting Sony’s history:

    Ideas

    Kameron Hurley: There Have Always Been Times Like These – Locus Online – Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom. –Ursula K. Le Guin

    Luxury

    ISSUE #1 — ARTSUMERISM – Power Dynamics by COPE – massification of luxury goods might have taken the artisan out of luxe. But has enabled it to develop an art collaboration somewhere between patron and influencer relationship.

    Marketing

    Interesting contrast between Ivy Yang’s A 2025 PR Playbook for an Unpredictable World – by Ivy Yang and Edelman’s Trust Barometer hand wringing around a crisis of grievance – 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer Reveals High Level of Grievance Towards Government, Business and the Rich.

    Kantar Media to be sold to US investment firm for £820m

    Materials

    Shoemaking experts Rose Anvil interview Fitasy on the advantages and challenges of using additive manufacturing for shoes. Fitasy provide a more realistic perspective on the circular economy benefits of filament printing at the end of the interview.

    Media

    It’s Time to End our Subscription Addiction | Futureproof News – the Substack economy can’t scale.

    Advertising folk, Britain’s young news readers are not all like you – The Media Leader

    Online

    About-Face(book) | Spyglass – MG Seigler covers the journey of Meta and Mark Zuckerberg

    Meta puts the ‘Dead Internet Theory’ into practice – Computerworld – Computerworld on Meta’s AI social media profiles designed to have personalities.

    Google’s mobile search results are dropping the ‘breadcrumbs’ from URLs – The Verge

    Will Video Kill the Audio Star in 2025? | Vulture – I find it a bit odd as an idea, but then I do listen to a lot of talking heads YouTube channels without looking at the participants such as TLDR, Chip Stock Investor et al and much of the CNBC content I listen to is an audio track from their TV feed.

    Technology

    ‘ChatGPT’ Robotics Moment in 2025 | AI Supremacy – this is a very software orientated look at things. Lights out factories have been pursued for decades. A big limitation is the physics governing strain wave bearings, which affects size and loads that can be managed. Much of the innovation has been in software until hardware can catch up.

    UK’s elite hardware talent is being wasted. | Josef – this reminds me a lot of working in the chemical and petrochemical industry at the start of my career. When enough people opt out the capability collapses in on itself.

    Daring Fireball: Siri Is Super Dumb and Getting Dumber

    Web of no web

    Tiny chip could offer spectral sensing for everyday devices | TechXplore

  • Campaign a-list questions

    Campaign recently published their a-list questions, go and check them out. Campaign is the default trade journal of the advertising industry, though you would be surprised how many agencies don’t have a subscription. I featured in a number these kind of features earlier in my career in Campaign sister publications and rivals. I was often pulled in because friends had suggested me.

    Here’s my take on the Campaign a-list questions below. It is a mix of the frivolous and the serious.

    Define your past year in three words.

    Eventful, emotional, grateful.

    • Eventful: a lot of projects happened and a number of projects didn’t happen at a very late stage, I lost a couple of good friends – one of whom to complications related to lupus.
    • Emotional: a number of highs and lows throughout the year.
    • Grateful: for the friends that I have made, most of whom have been professional connections, some long-standing.

    What brand will you be unable to live without in 2024?

    ‘Unable live without’ is a very first world problem related question. My workflow depends on the Apple eco-system. I use a MacBook Pro, a brace of vintage Apple Cinema displays and an iPhone. Brands that I am particularly appreciative of include HailMary magazine, Lipton Hong Kong café-style milk tea and Amazon Fresh online grocery shopping.

    Who or what lights up your life?

    • Friends and family.
    • Intellectually-challenging work.
    • Culture: I love museum exhibitions, galleries and arthouse cinema.
    • Reading.
    • Travel.
    • Music and my hi-fi.
    • Good coffee and baked goods.

    You can bring back a TV show from the past – which one?

    Maybe The Wire, a remake of John LeCarre’s Smiley books (huge fan of the BBC adaptations and the Tomas Alfredson film) or a new season of the Korean drama Stranger? I let my Netflix subscription lapse recently as I wasn’t watching that much on it and Netflix moved their payment system outside the Apple eco-system. Instead I have been buying the odd Blu-Ray or DVD here and there. Recent purchases included:

    It’s 2034 and AI is in charge. What are you pleased to see?

    Thoughtfully designed co-operative tools based on locally run apps using AI techniques rather than climate-unfriendly data centres. I hope that AI will be adapted to make workflow better so that we can do more with less drudgery.

    If you were a TikTok star, what audience would you serve?

    I have played with various AI tools. TikTok has lots of tightly-held opinions, but a dearth of quality information sources. I could see a niche for a channel that uses a virtual presenter to delivery high quality news analysis or education on the principles of a given subject, complete with links to high quality sources so that the viewers could educate themselves further.

    Cats or dogs?

    I grew up with dogs. We had a yellow labrador through my formative years to age 11 or so. We’d moved to a different neighbourhood and the new neighbours threw a chicken carcass over the fence and that killed him.

    Young Ged rollin' with the big 'dawg

    Later on my parents had a couple of Jack Russell terriers. I spent time on the family farm where my Mam grew up and befriended the working dogs there that were from the collie family. Before my time, the farm also had a couple of cats to keep down the vermin population, at least one of which my Mam doted on as a child and still talks about.

    I also spent time with turkeys, hens, sheep, a pig, a pony, a donkey and numerous cattle. At the moment I wouldn’t have either a cat or a dog as a pet, see work/life balance question below.

    What is the one bit of work advice you use the most?

    In strategy, I have been finding with recent projects I have had to invoke Twyman’s law: “Any figure that looks interesting or different is usually wrong”.

    What is your work/life balance secret?

    I admit, I don’t succeed in achieving work life balance. Work tends to win out. Things tend to go high-speed or nothing. Trying to take out blocks of me time for self-care after a project, is the closest I get to it.

    What is the first thing you do to tackle a business problem?

    Listen carefully.

    You are hiring the person who will one day have your job – what do they need to know?

    The value of hard work and learning. I would prefer to hire for ‘heart’, work ethic and curiosity. They need to find their own path or journey, that works for them.

    How would your answers to the Campaign a-list questions look like?

  • Listening pleasure

    I was reminded by an article in an old copy of the FT’s HTSI (How To Spend It) magazine about the diversity of what listening pleasure means to different people.

    TA 9000ES pre & power amplifier
    My own pre-amp / power amp combo

    Aural wallpaper

    For many of us, the personal equivalent of muzak masks distracting sounds in the neighbourhood or the odd sounds emanating from the heating pipes. It is a listening pleasure of sorts, masking things that might otherwise side track or agitate us while we carry on our own lives. Prior to COVID this meant an office or coffee shop full of workers with Bose noise cancelling headsets on, now its more likely to be Apple AirPods firmly implanted, although they struggle to hold up to the demands of a days worth of Microsoft Teams calls.

    In the home it can be: your smartphone, your computer, BlueTooth speaker, the radio, an old boombox or the TV set. I have a ritual in hotel rooms where after dropping my bags, the 24 hour TV news channel goes on low volume, ideally CNN. If I can’t get that, then I connect up my laptop and stream Bloomberg Live or podcasts.

    Dedicated listening

    If you derive listening pleasure by focusing more on what you are listening to then a higher quality system makes sense. Digital and analogue media can both provide a high quality audio experience. There are some fantastic vintage systems out there, it’s worthwhile educating yourself on products and setting up those eBay searches. Some streaming services now claim better than CD quality audio too, but more on that later.

    Good quality speakers can be inexpensive, though brands and models which were bargains just five years ago are now expensive as purchasers have educated themselves. A good deal of the listening pleasure from these kind of systems is the hunt and building the system as much as what you have playing through it.

    Space is the place

    Good quality audio performance is dependent on the source, the hi-fi, the speakers and the room that the hi-fi is set up in. A room can enormously impact speaker performance. When I used to DJ, I found this out to my cost. Perfectly parallel walls create reverb meaning you can have multiple versions of a recording coming back to you. Furniture and people are great at absorbing bass.

    Despite what you might see in hi-fi shows held in hotels, few of us have a room that would do a pair of B&W Nautilus justice, nor do we need a top of the range Mark Levinson amplifier.

    Instead it makes sense to look at good quality headphones, I use AKG K872 headphones. But this also means that you can get supporting hardware by the likes of Schiit Audio for a much more reasonable price.

    What sounds good is subjective and different equipment lends itself to different use cases. Do you want to listen to music, films or games? What genres will you be listening too?

    If you like fuzzbox-driven rock music, you probably wouldn’t like my audio system. My tastes vary from Vladimir Cosma and Manuel Göttsching to The Reflex, Jeff Mills and even a bit of Jim Reeves and Johnny Cash. I spent a good deal of my youth in friends bedroom recording studios and DJing in night clubs. All of which affected what sounds good to me. My own listening pleasure leans to a more analytical, transparent sound.

    The source

    Finally, there is the fidelity of recordings themselves, in the late 1990s and 2000s we saw what some musicians would call the ‘Loudness’ wars. Recordings were overly compressed by mastering engineers and we now have a generation of engineers who think that this is how things are done and genuinely believe that they are addressing the listening pleasure of the general public. Veteran audio engineers and hi-fi enthusiasts have noticed a 10+dB difference in recording sound levels. In reality each dB a doubling in volume as you hear it, so 10dB is a 1,204 times louder. Why did the over-compression happen? There are a number of hypotheses:

    • Digital signal processors and digital audio workstation software made it easier to tweak everything and so people did.
    • Older recordings get digitally remastered with an expectation that these recordings will be played on BlueTooth speakers and smartphones.
    • I have heard the remastering is also for car stereos as well, but the reality is that many car stereos have been better than the average persons home audio system for decades – because they are designed for the vehicle cabin.
    • The decline of consumers actively listening to music, using it as aural wallpaper, so looking for a constant volume.
    • The rise of nascent streaming services like Real Networks and Yahoo! Music.

    How do you know what is the best level of compression? This is a matter of personal taste. It depends on the genres of the music you like, does it have highs and lows? Are there quiet segments or pauses before a breakdown? Does it makes use of stereo spacing to move its sweeping sound around you?

    Audio spacing is important not only for listening to music but gaming and the home cinema experience.

    The problem with modern streaming services that look to provide ‘better than CD quality audio’ is as much on the original source as it is about the quality of streaming. Apple has tried to address this with its ‘Mastered for iTunes’ tools optimising for its platform, but that doesn’t have universal adoption in terms of remastering.

    The reality might be closer to what I saw at Yahoo! Music in the mid-2000s where ‘mastering’ for the service meant ripping retail compact disc using a HP desktop PC and uploading the song to the servers. Nothing particularly special was involved in the process.

    More information

    How much should you pay for your speakers? FT HTSI magazine

    Ruining Oxygene | renaissance chambara

    The Vintage Knob – some of the best content on vintage quality Japanese hi-fi

    Sennheiser HD250 II Linear headphones | renaissance chambara

  • Rundle in Korea

    The rundle as a term was popularised by business academic Scott Galloway.

    Overvalued unicorns, by Scott Galloway

    It means ‘recurring revenue bundle’. In the technology world bundling meant concealing the real price and value of a product, and or maximising leverage from one industry into another. Here are two bundle examples:

    • Mobile carrier combined text, data and call plans were originally designed to make it harder to compare one carriers offering with another. That was supposed to reduce customer churn because it was like comparing apples and oranges, rather than voice minutes, cost per text or cost per MB of data used
    • Microsoft integrated its web browser in with its operating system Windows. This meant that life was appreciably harder for Netscape to build its web browser business. Web developers in large corporates optimised their websites for Internet Explorer. Western Mac users like me couldn’t use online banking. Korean Mac users couldn’t get online because they couldn’t verify their identity. Korean cybersecurity was based on a common identity platform that relied on Microsoft ActiveX – which got hacked by North Korea….

    Back to rundle

    Remember the ‘recurring revenue’ bit?

    The classic example of a rundle that Scott Galloway uses is Amazon Prime. A one-off annual payment made by Amazon customers for free postage. There are also some ancillary benefits such as content from the Amazon Prime Video service. But Amazon Prime has a secondary effect, Prime customers spend more with Amazon over a year. This made increased profits for Amazon and less profits for its competitors, further strengthening Amazon’s hand. By 2019, 82 percent of US households have an Amazon Prime membership.

    Another example would be Apple’s service businesses:

    • Apple TV+
    • iCloud+
    • Apple Music

    So what’s the Korea connection?

    korea temple

    The rundle in Korea story started with a flower market.

    The Seoul wholesale flower market. The first thing that you need to know about Korean flower sales is how small they are. Here’s a rough and ready industry comparison. On average per person, per market on an annual basis:

    • The UK sells about $150 worth of flowers per year, per person
    • Japan sells about $50 worth of flowers per year, per person
    • South Korea sells about $15 worth of flowers per year, per person

    The first week in January meant that the trade was starting to get back to normal. Imports of flowers from around the world had started up again as foreign businesses reopened from the Christmas break. This is when things started to go weird. Wholesalers claimed that an online-only mail order flower company was cornering the market across a wide range of flowers driving prices up. The company that they alleged was doing this was Kukka. According to their allegations, Kukka had managed to get a wholesalers licence so that the could bid directly on the spot market for flowers. There is some anecdotal evidence that this drove florists already operating on meagre margins into the wall.

    At the time, this story didn’t make the local Korean media. Why? There are a few hypotheses:

    • Korean journalists weren’t interested because Koreans don’t buy that much flowers
    • Korean journalists couldn’t get enough sources to make the story fly
    • Korean news media publishers tend to be leery of stories that involve large corporates. What the Koreans call chaebols, unless they can’t really ignore the story any longer

    So why would Kukka have allegedly done this now? A few changes happened at Kukka the previous year. At least one of the founders left, a new management team was put in place and Kukka signed up to be part of T-Universe in August 2021.

    SK Telecom's T Universe

    SK Telecom officially launched T Universe at the end of August last year with a number of subscription services. Think of T Universe as a platform for bundles. It encompassed a number of Korean and international brands into rundles:

    • Amazon Global Store: remember that Amazon Prime won’t cover buying items on Amazon Japan or US? Well for $7.20 per month Koreans can get an Amazon Prime like free shipping. Frankly that would scare the crap out of my bank manager, given the amount of vinyl records, Blu-Rays and books that I would be buying
    • Starbucks: unlike most of the rest of the world, Starbucks isn’t the cock of the walk in Korea. It has a range of fierce domestic and international competitors in Korea. Koreans are big coffee drinkers and pay more than people in the UK for their coffee to go
    • Paris Baguette: despite the name, this company is as Korean as Shin spicy ramen noodles. Think of it as falling somewhere between Pret a Manger and Paul in terms of its offerings.
    • AIA insurance: AIA is an American-founded Hong Kong multinational insurance and finance corporation. It is the largest public listed life insurance and securities group in Asia-Pacific. It formerly used to be part of AIG

    Kukka is also part of these subscription plans with consumer being able to get 9000 Korean won vouchers every month.

    SKT

    SK Telecom (or SKT as its often known) is a vast business in its own right and is part of an even larger group SK.

    SK or as it was originally known Sunkyong Group started off in textiles and then became vertically integrated from petroleum to polyester fibres. Now the business covers:

    • Construction: aka SK Ecoplant does a wide range of projects across oil and gas, chemical plants, power generation and infrastructure, environmental protection, industrial buildings, civil engineering and housing
    • Pharmaceuticals with a focus on drug discovery and development
    • Chemicals also known as SK Innovation. SKC specialises in making polyester films for LCDs and solar cells.
    • Energy from oil and gas to electric battery production
    • Telecommunications
    • Trading and services: loyalty schemes (similar to Tesco Clubcard or Nectar points), a wedding consulting firm and an IT services provider with a particular focus on mobile commerce products. Their US arm launched Google Wallet
    • Semiconductors. SK Hynix is the world’s third largest semiconductor manufacturer

    Even SKT on its own is vast in its own right

    • Mobile carrier
    • E-banking and mobile payments
    • E-commerce platform (Shopify analogue with a loyalty programme)
    • Nate online portal (think Google services but Korean)
    • Satellite communications
    • Broadcast networks
    • Cable TV and brandband
    • T-Map (an Uber like service in partnership with Uber)
    • Dreamus: the people who make the Astell & Kern music players beloved of digital hi-fi enthusiasts

    Market distortions

    SKT brings a number of strengths to the T-Universe rundle series.

    It already handles 100,000,000 customer service calls a year

    • A huge existing customer base
    • CRM software and marketing data-mining expertise
    • It has the scale to bring on a 1,000 (sales) consultants to just focus on growing and upselling T-Universe

    SKT also doesn’t care about margin at the moment, instead focusing on market making:

    “Instead of a profit margin, we are thinking about expanding customer services and believe that new business models will emerge in the process. Margin is not a priority at this early stage,” Ryu said.

    SKT executive Ryu Young-sang quoted in the Korea Times: SKT to boost commerce biz with subscription platform (August 25, 2021)

    All of which is likely to mean a bump in potential customers for flowers, that probably haven’t bought flowers previously. It is easy to see how this rundle could create a market distortion. For businesses like Starbucks and Paris Baguette this would mean reduced margins on higher foot traffic, nothing that they couldn’t manage.

    However in a smaller market scenario like flowers, things could get more interesting. Huge demand from new customers that Kukka would be obliged to fulfil at ANY cost, because being sued in a Korean court by a chaebol would be disastrous.

    Korean business environment

    Korea is a relatively unique business environment. A few large businesses drive the country. You can literally live a Samsung life:

    • Work at Samsung
    • Shop at Shinsagae
    • Commute in your Samsung car
    • Stay in a Samsung hotel paid for with your Samsung card
    • Watch entertainment from CJ on your Samsung TV, tablet or phone
    • Ensure your safety with Samsung insurance for your Samsung built apartment and should you feel ill go to a Samsung hospital

    Online brought additional pressure to large businesses. Internet giant Kakao moved from internet media and communications to taxi bookings and mobile payments. Korean banks feeling under threat have moved into online services. So it was only a matter of time for SKT to build its rundle series for consumers to pick and choose from. Unlike many businesses (Apple and Amazon) who have moved from a transactional to a hybrid transactional and recurring revenue model, SKT was always a recurring revenue model because of its sector. So the only way for it to grow would be to expand the number of sectors that it got recurring revenue from with its ‘subscriptions of everyday things’ in T-Universe. SKT and the flower industry (let alone Kukka) look like apocryphal story of a hippo and a chick sharing the same bed.

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