Press / In the Press

Almost all of Hong Kong’s nine million inhabitants own an Octopus card. It enables them to pay the bill in restaurants, but also to pay for travel via all forms of public transport. Thereby, the user can easily switch between taxi, subway, bus, ferry or tram. The card is, among others, a reason why passengers in Hong Kong can travel faster from A to B than anywhere else in the world. This is a finding of a recent Arthur D. Little study on the Future of Urban Mobility. In Europe, some cities are now trying to introduce these smart-card solutions including car-sharing-offerings, too. The reason: In Germany, owning a car is dramatically less important to younger people, so shared mobility concepts carry more weight.

Premium manufacturers such as BMW expect record earnings for the current year and continue to show optimism.  Even for a possible downturn BMW seems to be forearmed, says a speaker of the Munich-based company. And this is exactly what looms in China: The findings of a recent Arthur D. Little-study reveal that this lucrative growth market in China will shrink from its current 15 per cent to 7 per cent in 2013. Initial indicators of this coming downturn are the rebates that Audi, Daimler and BMW must grant Chinese customers in order to lure them into the sales rooms.

Despite the crisis of the Euro and fears from the looming recession, the online-advertising industry continues to celebrate. In Germany alone, it is estimated EUR 3.5 billion has been spent in 2011 for advertising on the internet. This is a growth rate of 16 per cent. The growth will be further ramped up by the trend for more mobile devices like smartphones and tablet computers. This is the finding of a current Arthur D. Little-analysis which includes input from around 200 media experts. Moreover, 80% of respondents expect the convergence of TV and the Internet.

Google Wallet is one of Google’s newer offerings. With this payment-service, the Californians are not only attacking banks but also mobile service companies. Meanwhile, Deutsche Telekom, Vodafone and O2 are all working on their own concepts. “The digital moneybag is a multi-billion-market, we see growth rates of 80 per cent per year“, says Nicolai Schaettgen from Arthur D. Little. Mobile service firms and commercial banks often neglected this trend by now, says Schaettgen.

Larger cities often suffer from congestion due to limited space for parking lots. “Therefore, cars predominantly cannot solve the traffic-related problems within cities“, states Stefan Lippautz, an Arthur D. Little mobility-expert. He advises OEMs to invest into new business segments and names BMW as an example; the Bavarians already cooperate with the New York-based company Mycityway, which has an App that suggests the easiest and fastest means of transport – and often, this is not a car.

The Networked Society City Index is a new ranking that tries to convey the correlation between investments in information- and communication technologies (ICT) and the ecological, economical and social developments of a city. Developed by equipment manufacturer Ericsson and Arthur D. Little, the index shows that cities investing more than the average in ICT-infrastructure are as a rule leading in areas like infrastructure, environment protection, public security and healthcare. Singapore, Stockholm and Seoul rank 1-3 proving that ICT-investments make a significant contribution to making urban cities not only wealthier, but also more worth living in.

Whether it is whole machines or modern IT-systems, leasing instead of buying has become a major trend. For small and medium-sized company companies, leasing models are desirable as it enables costs to be calculated more easily. This is particularly apparent with commercial vehicles: 64 per cent of all these vehicles are leased. But, considering the satisfaction with the leasing company, there seems to be a critical mass: Experts say there is a minimum of 25 vehicles necessary to make the leasing company strive to satisfy the customer. In general, a rule of thumb applies saying the smaller the vehicle fleet, the more dissatisfied the customers are likely to be with the services of the leasing-company. This is one of the findings of a recent Arthur D. Little analysis.