asset light

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description: a business model where a company owns fewer capital assets compared to its operations, often relying on outsourcing and leasing

32 results

The Big Fix: How Companies Capture Markets and Harm Canadians

by Denise Hearn and Vass Bednar  · 14 Oct 2024  · 175pp  · 46,192 words

industry.46 The biggest hotel brands, however, don’t own most of their hotels outright. They enter into franchising agreements with hotels to maintain an asset-light approach to controlling the industry. Marriott shows thirty-two of its forty hotels and brands it either owns or has licensing agreements with in the

Work in the Future The Automation Revolution-Palgrave MacMillan (2019)

by Robert Skidelsky Nan Craig  · 15 Mar 2020

. First of all, what is Uber’s business model? They are what I have elsewhere called a ‘lean platform’.1 They aim to be very asset light: they try to own as little as possible. Uber, for instance does not own the cars; they do not have to pay for fuel; they

Humans as a Service: The Promise and Perils of Work in the Gig Economy

by Jeremias Prassl  · 7 May 2018  · 491pp  · 77,650 words

-entrepreneur’ is designed to ‘disrupt’. A complete lack of employment protection (and the significant cost savings that come with it) is crucial to on-demand, ‘asset-light’ operations’ offers of cheap and abundant services. It is not difficult to find instances of genuine entrepreneurship in the gig economy: think of a plumber

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eco- nomic perspectives: the company’s efforts seem to lag significantly behind competitors’ technological advances.75 In any event, why would Uber replace its current asset-light model, under which drivers bear the full cost of pro- viding cars, petrol, and their time, with a massive investment in an expensive fleet of

Super Founders: What Data Reveals About Billion-Dollar Startups

by Ali Tamaseb  · 14 Sep 2021  · 251pp  · 80,831 words

looked at the least capital-efficient companies among billion-dollar startups, again I found a mix of software, SaaS, pharma, and physical products. Some otherwise asset-light software companies needed to spend a lot on marketing, customer acquisition, and sales, which increased their capital spent over the long run. Even within SaaS

Quality Investing: Owning the Best Companies for the Long Term

by Torkell T. Eide, Lawrence A. Cunningham and Patrick Hargreaves  · 5 Jan 2016  · 178pp  · 52,637 words

measure of a company’s asset intensity. Or, put another way, how much capital needs to remain in the business in order to generate sales. Asset-light industries are attractive since they require less capital to be deployed in order to generate sales growth. The finest examples are franchise operations, such as

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capital and capex that higher volumes entail, will inevitably rise to some extent as volume grows. As a result, volume growth is particularly valuable for asset-light businesses boasting high margins and those with high operating leverage, such as pharmaceutical or software companies. Cyclical market growth Cyclicality is a double-edged sword

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at the flip of a switch; even manufacturing companies typically produce spare parts using machinery and equipment already in operation. Specific service activity is also asset-light – usually personnel and a simple set of tools. The combination of potentially negative working capital, rapid cash flows, and low capital expenditure to support growth

The Network Imperative: How to Survive and Grow in the Age of Digital Business Models

by Barry Libert and Megan Beck  · 6 Jun 2016  · 285pp  · 58,517 words

another great example. With more than twelve hundred properties under management, Starwood is currently pursuing an asset-light strategy, selling about $1.5 billion in property from 2013 to 2015. The hope is that an asset-light strategy will enable greater market flexibility and focus on the core business, which is property management and

The Unusual Billionaires

by Saurabh Mukherjea  · 16 Aug 2016

, data. Page started operations in 1995 with capital employed of only Rs 1 crore. Given the shortage of capital, the management team kept the business asset-light by using various methods such as leasing land instead of outright purchase, outsourcing capital-intensive processes like spinning, knitting and weaving, and incurring capex only

The Next Factory of the World: How Chinese Investment Is Reshaping Africa

by Irene Yuan Sun  · 16 Oct 2017  · 239pp  · 62,311 words

Growth and Opportunity Act. Congress did eventually approve the deal, but not before half of the clothing firms in Lesotho had shut down. For relatively asset-light types of manufacturing such as garment production, any change in conditions can spook at least some manufacturers away to other locales. I went across town

Wild Ride: Inside Uber's Quest for World Domination

by Adam Lashinsky  · 31 Mar 2017  · 190pp  · 62,941 words

remarkable about Red Swoosh’s plan isn’t just its tweak on the commercially attractive aspects of Scour, but how it foreshadowed the so-called asset-light strategy that would be Uber’s secret sauce. Just as Red Swoosh software would push and pull files from personal computers owned by others, Uber

Built for Growth: How Builder Personality Shapes Your Business, Your Team, and Your Ability to Win

by Chris Kuenne and John Danner  · 5 Jun 2017  · 276pp  · 64,903 words

of the waste business became his mission and that of the company he founded and runs, Rubicon Global. He created what is known as an asset-light business, in which his firm owns no trucks or landfills, but rather provides a brokering system, as Uber does with passenger cars. Morris aspired to

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–120, 138, 139 Apple, 17, 154 AppNexus, 58–60, 65–66, 74, 220–221 ARC Document Solutions, 129–130 Arnold & Porter, 118 Arvai, Peter, 127 asset-light businesses, 94–95 autocratic behavior, 80 Bai Brands, 4–5, 32, 41–42, 48, 52 customer dynamic at, 39 Bain Capital, 104 Bank of America

Dual Transformation: How to Reposition Today's Business While Creating the Future

by Scott D. Anthony and Mark W. Johnson  · 27 Mar 2017  · 293pp  · 78,439 words

100 Baggers: Stocks That Return 100-To-1 and How to Find Them

by Christopher W Mayer  · 21 May 2018

When McKinsey Comes to Town: The Hidden Influence of the World's Most Powerful Consulting Firm

by Walt Bogdanich and Michael Forsythe  · 3 Oct 2022  · 689pp  · 134,457 words

Amazon: How the World’s Most Relentless Retailer Will Continue to Revolutionize Commerce

by Natalie Berg and Miya Knights  · 28 Jan 2019  · 404pp  · 95,163 words

The 100-Year Life: Living and Working in an Age of Longevity

by Lynda Gratton and Andrew Scott  · 1 Jun 2016  · 344pp  · 94,332 words

The Business of Platforms: Strategy in the Age of Digital Competition, Innovation, and Power

by Michael A. Cusumano, Annabelle Gawer and David B. Yoffie  · 6 May 2019  · 328pp  · 84,682 words

No Ordinary Disruption: The Four Global Forces Breaking All the Trends

by Richard Dobbs and James Manyika  · 12 May 2015  · 389pp  · 87,758 words

The Sharing Economy: The End of Employment and the Rise of Crowd-Based Capitalism

by Arun Sundararajan  · 12 May 2016  · 375pp  · 88,306 words

America's Bitter Pill: Money, Politics, Backroom Deals, and the Fight to Fix Our Broken Healthcare System

by Steven Brill  · 5 Jan 2015  · 554pp  · 167,247 words

Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future

by Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson  · 26 Jun 2017  · 472pp  · 117,093 words

The Thinking Machine: Jensen Huang, Nvidia, and the World's Most Coveted Microchip

by Stephen Witt  · 8 Apr 2025  · 260pp  · 82,629 words

Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century

by Tim Higgins  · 2 Aug 2021  · 430pp  · 135,418 words

Lessons from the Titans: What Companies in the New Economy Can Learn from the Great Industrial Giants to Drive Sustainable Success

by Scott Davis, Carter Copeland and Rob Wertheimer  · 13 Jul 2020  · 372pp  · 101,678 words

Dear Chairman: Boardroom Battles and the Rise of Shareholder Activism

by Jeff Gramm  · 23 Feb 2016  · 384pp  · 103,658 words

Boom: Bubbles and the End of Stagnation

by Byrne Hobart and Tobias Huber  · 29 Oct 2024  · 292pp  · 106,826 words

The Firm

by Duff McDonald  · 1 Jun 2014  · 654pp  · 120,154 words

Inner Entrepreneur: A Proven Path to Profit and Peace

by Grant Sabatier  · 10 Mar 2025  · 442pp  · 126,902 words

Billion Dollar Loser: The Epic Rise and Spectacular Fall of Adam Neumann and WeWork

by Reeves Wiedeman  · 19 Oct 2020  · 303pp  · 100,516 words

The Cult of We: WeWork, Adam Neumann, and the Great Startup Delusion

by Eliot Brown and Maureen Farrell  · 19 Jul 2021  · 460pp  · 130,820 words

Corporate Finance: Theory and Practice

by Pierre Vernimmen, Pascal Quiry, Maurizio Dallocchio, Yann le Fur and Antonio Salvi  · 16 Oct 2017  · 1,544pp  · 391,691 words

The Smartest Guys in the Room

by Bethany McLean  · 25 Nov 2013  · 778pp  · 233,096 words

Taming the Sun: Innovations to Harness Solar Energy and Power the Planet

by Varun Sivaram  · 2 Mar 2018  · 469pp  · 132,438 words