Assets management and revenue streams

I addressed in my previous post some of the relevant key topics to lead future mobility business cases. I move forward now to analyse which are the assets and the revenue streams of this new business model

Managing fleet of autonomous vehicles offers the unique opportunity to use a series of assets to increase the value of the business and develop multiple collateral business cases linked with the operations.

Each asset can be owned/acquired/leased/ to run the business case and create more revenues streams

Real estate.

Storage and parking. Having access to storage hubs and parking infrastructures will be a key factors when we’ll have thousands of vehicles running.

Garages for car services. Traditional car dealers and services will shift their core business from privates or direct customers to fleet and an efficient and fast organisation will optimise the operations

Charging hubs (Renewable powered, smart grid, vehicle2grid applications). Grid balance in cities will be an issue and those players with direct access to infrastructures will be facilitated. Energy will be the new “oil” and its availability can be improved thanks to renewable power.

Big data

Among world top ten brands as per capitalisation (Amazon, Apple, Google,) and  in mobility also (Uber) there are companies owning huge amount of data. Big data will be a mainstream revenue stream for those able to monetise and create value from that. Transport and mobility provide a relevant amount, coming from the following areas:

• Mobility patterns (Matrix o/d)
• Mapping data (for autonomous driving software applications)
• Driving data (travel behaviour, drivers behaviour in different environment, incentives for drivers, privacy policies)
• Fleet data/Insurance
• Artificial intelligence for mobility and user experience

Fleet

Cars are not only the main asset for running the operations as there are multiple  options to get value from the vehicle:

• Financial asset. Financing the fleet allows to have interest gain
• Second life Battery pack strategies (link to storage business model). The batteries of the vehicles can shift into a second life plan to re-market them at the end of the first lifecycle for storage and other utilisations.
• Marketing. On purpose vehicles are a branding tool (as Moia just proved with their launch few days ago)
• Commercial (promotion and re-marketing). Vehicles can generate more revenue once we move them into the re-marketing plan and second sales.

Entertainment

What shall we do during our trips in autonomous cars? Many operators are raising this questions and pay per use services (entertainment/business) to be developed for self driving cars seems to be a collateral area of interest. Whether we use our subscriptions (Netflix, Spotify and similar), I bet many services will be integrated directly in the cars.

If those are some of the assets to be leveraged in future mobility business, there is an complementary strategy to address which seems to be the big umbrella where including the whole stack of innovation: MAAS: mobility as a service. Once the volume of ridesharing trips will really shift our cities mobility patterns we have to expect that large corporations will aggregate vertical players to create the biggest

platform to really go from A to B with one touch. Many are competing already around the world and capitalisations will drive the winning ones.

East regions (China, Malaysia, India) faces deregulated market where new mobility services (ride sharing/ride hailing) have established brands like  DIDI (China) Grab (Malaysia) Careem (Middle east) OLA (india). Many of them have international growth plans or even to extend operations (Didi just announced 151M$ investment to enter the car sharing market).

West regions (USA/Canada). is the cradle of new mobility and player are competing at the forefront of innovation thanks to most famous brands Uber/Lyft, Waymo/Apple.

Europe:  is an highly regulated market and new mobility struggles to become real in terms of volumes. Further than direct business development a potential strategy to fast the process in the early stage is to link with public transport operators or car manufacturers that are familiar with regulations and they are entering in the mobility arena. Business development is  subject to local/national Government approval even if EU policies are expected within few years time to create the legal framework.

So there’s a lot to do and we can be sure that mobility, public transport industry and automotive will converge in a whole new competitive arena that we don’t know the boundaries yet.