vertical integration

The Meat Racket: The Secret Takeover of America's Food Business

by Christopher Leonard  · 18 Feb 2014  · 444pp  · 128,701 words

that emerged. By doing so, it wrote the blueprint for modern meat production. At the core of Tyson’s strategy is an economic principle called vertical integration. In a nutshell, this refers to the way companies buy up the outside firms that supply them (picture what would happen if Apple Inc.

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bought the company that sold it microchips). When a company becomes vertically integrated, it takes under its control and ownership all the independent businesses that once supported it. In Tyson’s case, the company has swallowed up

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poultry business. Then the company expanded into raising hogs. Within two short decades America’s independent hog industry was wiped out and replaced with a vertically integrated, corporate-controlled model. Ninety percent of all hog farms disappeared. The amount of money spent at grocery stores went up, but the amount of

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money farmers received went down. Companies like Tyson keep much of the difference. The cattle industry is the last holdout against vertical integration, but even the cowboys are starting to buckle under the pressure to surrender their independence. Tyson and three other companies so dominate the beef industry

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farming are slowing down, but Tyson’s control over the marketplace has not loosened. Once the broad-based meat industry was traded away for a vertically integrated one, the deal could not be easily undone. The economies of scale now make it almost impossible for new competitors to enter the field

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vital statistics from farms stretching through Georgia to Delaware to Arkansas. Tyson’s headquarters is the real seat of power in the new, vertically integrated meat industry. To understand how vertical integration works, and how it controls the livelihoods of people like Jerry and Kanita Yandell, it is helpful to tour the wide expanse

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doesn’t matter anyway. The power arrangement is set by Tyson, and the farmer learns the rules quickly enough, whatever the documents might say. Vertical integration gives companies like Tyson the kind of power that feudal lords once held. The company can cancel a farmer’s contract and put him out

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accounting in the poultry industry. As Jackson researched the industry, he found only one slim pamphlet that discussed how to account for operations at a vertically integrated chicken company. The business was simply too new to have well-defined practices. Like everyone else at Tyson, Jackson found himself making up new rules

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biggest national grocery chains and restaurants, like Wal-Mart and McDonald’s. The remainder of the market was controlled by smaller versions of Tyson, vertically integrated companies that were still enormous by historical standards. By 1992, 88 percent of all chicken in the United States was produced in the kind of

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this tournament and helped drive local farmers, and then one another, out of business. The rules of this tournament illustrate the logical conclusion of vertical integration, and what it means for farmers and rural communities when one company gains control over the levers of meat production. And at the heart of

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jumped into the business, offering loans of hundreds of thousands of dollars to finance new hog buildings. Tyson’s Foods invested millions to build a vertically integrated hog complex outside Holdenville, complete with a feed mill, trucking line, and veterinary services. Perhaps the most important part of the complex was a

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on the factory line that translated into wasted money and slimmer profit margins. There had been scattered experiments around the country to vertically integrate cow production, just as Tyson had vertically integrated chicken and hog farming. But these efforts were all stopped short by two of the cow’s internal organs: the rumen and

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the chicken industry and trying to buy its way into markets it couldn’t control and that didn’t fit with its primary strategy of vertical integration. Buying IBP would overshadow the chicken operations of Tyson Foods and saddle the company with cattle and pork businesses that Tyson executives poorly understood.

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hogs sold through negotiated transaction. That was the lowest level in U.S. history. The remaining 98 percent of hogs were grown under contract for vertically integrated companies like Smithfield, or sold through the kind of long-term forward contracts favored by Tyson. Wirtz was being boxed in. He looked at

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’s hard to get a better price when the buyers refuse to bid against one another. What has evolved is a kind of de facto vertical integration, with whole networks of feedlots tied to meatpackers under contract. The cattle market is technically an open one, but no one behaves that way,

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resistance to the rise of the meat oligarchy. There have been a few notable fights in which regulators have tried to slow the tide of vertical integration. These efforts show why it is so hard to stem the power of industrial meat producers. But they also show how even a single

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’s strongest farm state, the land of cheap corn and soybeans. In the mid-1990s, Iowa Attorney General Tom Miller launched a fight against vertically integrated meat production that ended up encompassing more than a dozen states and went all the way to Washington, D.C., and the halls of Congress

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. But the legal and intellectual resistance to vertical integration didn’t start with Tom Miller. Decades before Miller ever filed a legal challenge in Iowa, a small group of intellectuals started to sound warnings

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. * * * Heffernan’s research was based in the rural area of Union Parish in Louisiana, where a booming poultry industry was expanding in the 1960s. Vertically integrated poultry production was still a radical concept back then, and Heffernan wanted to study it. So he undertook an effort that no one else seems

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by Wall Street capital? Would Americans have any say over how their food was produced? Breimyer ended his book with a warning. He said vertical integration alone wasn’t a problem, but it would become toxic if companies like Tyson were allowed to buy their competitors and gain broad market power

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A 1975 law banned meatpackers in Iowa from owning their own animals. The old state statute broke the most critical link in a chain of vertical integration: If companies couldn’t own both slaughterhouses and farms, they couldn’t gain complete control over the marketplace. Because of Iowa’s corporate farming

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. By 1999, Murphy Farms was raising about 900,000 pigs under contract in Iowa. But with the packer ban in place, the full circle of vertical integration was kept from closing. And the worst practices were kept at bay. * * * In September 1999, Moline was driving home when he heard the news

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sector had been swallowed under Smithfield’s control. Moline couldn’t believe what he’d heard. Smithfield had just blatantly violated Iowa’s ban on vertical integration. The company knew full well the ban was in place and would prohibit it from buying Murphy Farms, yet it had gone ahead with

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replied. — We’ll have to see about that, Moline said, before hanging up. Iowa was about to wage the nation’s biggest legal fight against vertically integrated meat production. That fight would eventually spill over and affect other companies, from Tyson to Cargill and Hormel. * * * The matter seemed clear-cut to

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Murphy Farms. The company was essentially saying that the state government had no role in writing the rules of the livestock industry. The ban on vertical integration was meaningless. If Smithfield had the money to close the deal, that’s apparently all that mattered. Moline and Tabor worked the phones and

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’s biggest farming state sent a warning to all the major hog producers: Iowa’s hog farmers weren’t going to be sucked into a vertically integrated system. Not without a fight. * * * Joe Luter, the Smithfield Foods CEO, walked down the narrow path between office cubicles in Tom Miller’s office

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school him in the realities of modern agriculture. — You have to understand what’s going on in this industry, Luter said. Luter explained how vertically integrated chicken production had changed everything. The rise of cheap chicken put pressure on every other kind of meat, driving pork and beef off fast-food

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, it would shrink to obsolescence. The only way to compete with chicken was to imitate it. The evolution was unstoppable, and Iowa’s ban on vertical integration was irrelevant. The transformation was going to happen regardless. The litigation, in other words, was pointless. — We don’t want the chickenization of the

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the case against Smithfield. * * * The lawsuit against Smithfield turned out to be far more complicated than just trying to enforce the packer ban. By prohibiting vertical integration, the attorney general’s office was essentially suing Smithfield over the company’s business model. So Smithfield just cleverly changed its business model, without really

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’s home state of Arkansas did not join, but several important farm states supported the bill, from Nebraska to Missouri, Oklahoma, and Wisconsin. By pushing vertical integration into Iowa, Smithfield had invited a fight that threatened to change the economic order of the meat industry throughout much of the Midwest. * * * Eric

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angles: through litigation and the creation of new laws. The lawsuit against Smithfield, filed just a few months earlier, threatened to upend the creeping vertical integration of the hog industry. At the same time, Miller was pressing for the passage of the Producer Protection Act in sixteen states, which would limit

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’t understand, Baker replied. Page explained to Baker that tough rules in Iowa would hinder the industry. In Page’s view, contract farming and vertical integration were essential pillars of the modern food business. The food system just wouldn’t work without them. Page knew that Cargill had a team of

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that companies would cancel their contracts in retaliation. The bill wasn’t radical in the sense that it didn’t ban contracts, didn’t outlaw vertical integration, and didn’t establish as many rights for farmers as Tom Miller proposed with his state-level proposal. But it was still too much

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trade barriers. It says that only Congress can pass laws that affect interstate commerce. Smithfield argued that Iowa’s packer ban was hindering interstate commerce. Vertical integration was embedded in the agricultural economies of the southern states. Banning it on a state-by-state basis violated the idea of an integrated, national

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Unfortunately for Moline and Tabor, they were scheduled to go before the very same federal court to try to argue that Iowa’s ban on vertical integration was legal. It was a losing fight after the South Dakota ruling. Moline didn’t see the point in fighting. Smithfield would win and

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of legislation that had been killed in sixteen states and Washington: the Producer Protection Act. Miller agreed not to enforce the state’s ban on vertical integration, but only for ten years. In return, Smithfield was required to voluntarily comply with a boiled-down version of the Producer Protection Act. With

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to Tyson Foods. Her husband, President Bill Clinton, was seen as Tyson’s greatest political patron, who’d helped usher in the age of vertically integrated meat production—and had profited handsomely along the way from Tyson’s campaign donations. Hillary Clinton’s tenure on Wal-Mart’s board of directors

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ways the person to institute sweeping changes. As Iowa’s governor, Vilsack consistently stood behind Attorney General Tom Miller as Miller fought the rise of vertically integrated pork production. Vilsack knew about the rampant problems in the poultry industry and the concentration of power among big seed companies like Monsanto. Perhaps more

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Donnie Smith’s star was rising. * * * If ever there was a time when an alternative model of meat production might arise to challenge Tyson’s vertically integrated system, it was during the winter of 2009. The opportunity was born after Pilgrim’s Pride declared bankruptcy in December 2008. But what unfolded after

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. It was Tom Miller, the slender white-haired attorney general of Iowa, who had spent more than a decade trying to roll back the vertical integration of the pork industry. Through his one-of-a-kind settlement with Smithfield Foods, Miller had laid out a template for regulating meat companies across

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drastic measures. They discussed imposing an outright “packer ban” that would bar meatpackers from owning their own livestock, a measure long supported by opponents of vertical integration. If applied to the cattle industry, the ban would undoubtedly mean more cattle were bought and sold on the open market. If applied to the

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The USDA couldn’t determine the gap for chicken because there wasn’t a good way to determine the price on the farm. In a vertically integrated system the company always owned the birds, and it kept the prices confidential. David Murphy arrived at the hearing with some heavy boxes. Murphy

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clear how well the company did by the communities that made it rich. Remarkably little research has been done to measure the economic impact of vertically integrated meat production on the nation’s economy. Instead, the massive firepower of public research dollars has been aimed at a different question: how to

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fact that everything about Tyson Foods seems hidden: Notes from reporting, Springdale, Arkansas. At the core of Tyson’s strategy is an economic principle called vertical integration: James Blair, Joe Fred Starr, Don Tyson, Buddy Wray, interviews by author, 2010 and 2011; background interviews by author. Tyson first pioneered this model

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a full-grown chicken fell: Facts on chickens getting bigger derived from USDA report on transformation of livestock industry, and chicken breeding reports; Tomislav Vukina, “Vertical Integration and Contracting in the U.S. Poultry Sector. Journal of Food Distribution Research (July 2011), 33. After realizing the huge boost of savings that came

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adopted in, 149, 173–74, 209, 212n, 223, 225 Tyson’s dominance in, 180, 208–9, 281n USDA grades in, 213, 215–16, 222 vertical integration in, 5, 172, 209, 285 volatile market cycles in, 209, 213 Zilmax used in, 225, 226 see also cattle ranching; feedlots, cattle; meat industry Beef

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240, 241, 262, 287, 311 USDA/DOJ workshops on growing power of corporations in, 279–82, 287, 288, 289, 294–95, 298, 302–3 vertical integration in, see vertical integration see also specific meat industries meatpackers, 211, 212, 223, 225, 240, 247, 251, 285, 288, 295, 303 control over animal producers by, 5, 7

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competitor to, 167–68 tight control over animal producers in, 5, 156, 157, 159, 184, 192–93, 204, 266 tournament system of pay in, 192 vertical integration in, 156, 157, 191, 202 Tyson’s Pride, 307 unemployment rates, 156, 195, 267, 276, 297, 311 Union Parish, La., 230, 231–33 unions,

The Content Trap: A Strategist's Guide to Digital Change

by Bharat Anand  · 17 Oct 2016  · 554pp  · 149,489 words

hadn’t changed. The format had. And in this case, spillovers ran from print to digital rather than the other way round. THE PUZZLE OF VERTICAL INTEGRATION Vertical integration refers to the combination of content and distribution. The idea has long been a lightning rod in the entertainment industry. The recent rush was triggered

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their bankers, criticism of them deepened. Why? Consider the canonical scenario: a distributor or a TV network buys a production studio. The conventional arguments for vertical integration go something like this: When a distributor buys upstream content, it can better control programming costs (if a cable operator bought ESPN, it could avoid

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gains come directly at the expense of the producer’s profits, which suffer. It’s another zero-sum transfer. The flaw in the logic of vertical integration is simple: Transferring money from one pocket to another doesn’t increase your cash. Yet it’s an argument that most proponents of

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vertical integration repeatedly miss. The logic of zero-sum transfers implies that the value of content in a vertically integrated entity should be no different than that in a nonintegrated one. However the relationship is structured—whether

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content decisions should be the same: Hit programs should always be kept on the air, duds always taken off. Zero-sum logic suggests, then, that vertical integration brings no benefit other than increasing the power and influence of an acquirer. This is the reason for skepticism about integration, for why in practice

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than two, not only expands its profits by increasing demand, it helps consumers too. And that’s no longer zero-sum. A recent study of vertical integration in cable television found just this effect: When cable operators acquire regional sports networks, prices fall by around 18%, making everyone better off

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. Vertical integration can create value in other cases too—but you need to dig deeper into content quality and what drives it. Content quality is a mysterious

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vary according to whether or not they owned them. But they apply to everything else—or, roughly 90 percent of all content. A study of vertical integration in the broadcast television industry found precisely this. The 1990s were a good time to examine this issue: During the prior decade integration had increased

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owned—by placing it next to more established programs (see Veronica’s Closet and Friends ), or promoting it to viewers drawn there. If you view vertical integration as a way for a distributor to acquire well-known content or gain access to an established property—often the rationale touted for such deals

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in acquiring great content—they’re in promoting lesser-known content by piggybacking on established content. They come from product connections. Fifty Shades of Piggybacking Vertical integration isn’t the only form of piggybacking in TV. Channel bundling—when content providers offer all-or-nothing deals to distributors—is another practice whereby

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the most common today. But often it’s not product focus that wins; it’s product connections. Franchises and sequels, covers and same-name apps, vertical integration and bundling, backward spillovers and traffic machines—all are responses to the challenge of getting noticed. The solutions are all similar: Use known products to

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currencies around the world has been to zoom in on differences in culture—but the lessons are far more general. We see these errors elsewhere. Vertical integration, the practice of marrying content and distribution, is thought to be the answer to every content producer’s problem—until the next big merger fails

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, and then it isn’t. View vertical integration as a best practice that every firm ought to embrace and you’ll be utterly confused as to why it sometimes fails and why some

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. H. Lo. “Tencent: Expanding from China to the World.” University of Hong Kong case no. HK1009, June 21, 2013. Boston: Harvard Business Publishing. Chipty, Tasneem. “Vertical Integration, Market Foreclosure, and Consumer Welfare in the Cable Television Industry.” American Economic Review 91, no. 3 (June 2001): 428–53. Chopra, Sunil, and Murali Veeraiyan

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Uber.” National Bureau of Economic Research, Working Paper No. 22083, March 2016. Crawford, Gregory, Robin Lee, Michael Whinston, and Ali Yurukoglu. “The Welfare Effects of Vertical Integration in Multichannel Television Markets.” National Bureau of Economic Research, Working Paper No. w21832, December 2015. Crawford, Gregory S., and Ali Yurukoglu. “The Welfare Effects of

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Ghemawat, “Fox Broadcasting Company,” HBS No. 9-387-096 (Boston: Harvard Business Publishing, rev. April 2, 1993). A recent study of vertical integration Gregory Crawford et al., “The Welfare Effects of Vertical Integration in Multichannel Television Markets,” National Bureau of Economic Research, Working Paper No. w21832, December 2015. They examine not just the benefits

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to rival distributors, and find that “program access rules” allow markets to reap the benefits of integration without its associated cost. See also Tasneem Chipty, “Vertical Integration, Market Foreclosure, and Consumer Welfare in the Cable Television Industry,” American Economic Review 91, no. 3 (June 2001): 428–53. on a portfolio approach Another

The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires

by Tim Wu  · 2 Nov 2010  · 418pp  · 128,965 words

shown that the most successful pictures have been developed by individual efforts rather than by mass production.”6 What Hodkinson opposed is what economists call vertical integration—the stacking, as it were, of the parts of an industry that perform different functions (here, production, distribution, and exhibition) to create a consolidated single

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rules of supply and demand by virtue of the product’s less tangible forms of value. We might understand perfectly well how block booking and vertical integration reduced the costs of industrial production, while understanding nothing of what these innovations meant for film as a form of expression. Interestingly, when it comes

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, but as owner of NBC, RCA now viewed the network’s interests as synonymous with its own. And so we see another instance of how vertical integration of an industry creates a vested interest in limiting free expression. Profit is tied not to the proliferation of many voices but to the propagation

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radio programming would migrate to television. Conversely, television would be nothing more than visible radio. And so we see the now familiar effect of a vertically integrated industry subsuming a new information medium, wresting control of it from a disorganized industry that in all likelihood would have nurtured more experimentation and more

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rate of return—if not on every film, on the product in the aggregate. Each of the five major studios had by then undergone full vertical integration, with its own production resources (including not just lots and cameras but actors, directors, and writers as human cogs as well), distribution system, and proprietary

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, the cartel sought to iron out the discrepancy between the hits and flops, making the fate of any one film that much more predictable. The vertical integration of the studios that arose in the 1920s with Paramount and the rest can also be understood as an attempt to minimize risk to their

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forty-two years ago.”5 It looked as if the future had indeed arrived. To many it seemed that the Internet would eventually belong to vertically integrated giants on the model of AOL Time Warner. Here’s Steve Lohr writing in The New York Times in 2000: “The America Online–Time Warner

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of conglomerates then already beginning to buy up the most important websites. The early 2000s might have turned into a war of accumulation among three vertically integrated great powers: Microsoft-GE (NBC’s parent), AOL Time Warner, and Comcast-Disney. Eventually everything on the Internet would have been owned by one of

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cool stuff for free. The second Google difference is in its corporate structure. The firm, while having as many ventures as it has engineers, eschews vertical integration of these efforts to a degree virtually unprecedented for a communications giant. This structural distinction may be hard to grasp, so let’s explain it

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of both wires and content to succeed in the 2000s. He was wrong. That’s the advantage. On the other hand, Google’s lack of vertical integration leaves it vulnerable, rather like a medieval city without a wall.* He who controls the wires or airwaves can potentially destroy Google, for it is

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announced plans to build its own fiber optic connections, another bold incursion into the lands of telephone and cable and its first real flirtation with vertical integration. The full scope of the motivations isn’t clear—Google insists it means only to create a “showcase” designed to spur the telephone and cable

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produced a computer closely resembling the Apple Macintosh. The Apple Lisa also, technically, came between the Macintosh but did not thrive. * As we’ve seen, vertical integration serves as often as a means of corporate defense as efficiency. By combining related functions, the integrated entity can prevent rivals from depriving it of

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integration of industrial functions (as when a single entity controls every stage of creating and delivering the product). Such concentration through horizontal monopoly and/or vertical integration typically finds its license, its basis for societal acquiescence, in a specific kind of consumer gratification that size and centralization make possible: reliable, universal telephone

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and technical innovation that are excluded in the name of perfection and empire. More than anything else, the preceding chapters chronicle the corrupting effects of vertically integrated power. A strong stake in more than one layer of the industry leaves a firm in a position of inherent conflict of interest. You cannot

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private individuals to enforce the Production Code, a regime of censorship without equal in American culture and entirely insulated from First Amendment challenge. By fighting vertical integrations, a Separations Principle would remove the temptations and vulnerabilities to which such entities are heir. It represents the difference between free speech as an abstract

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(1974), Cable: Report to the President. A summary and discussion of the Nixon Cabinet Committee’s recommendations is in David Waterman and Andrew A. Weiss, Vertical Integration in Cable Television (Washington, DC: AEI Press, 1997), 1–2. For a discussion of the “separations policy,” the “open skies” policy, and other developments in

The Four: How Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google Divided and Conquered the World

by Scott Galloway  · 2 Oct 2017  · 305pp  · 79,303 words

’ve been advising luxury brands for twenty-five years and believe these firms, from Porsche to Prada, share five key attributes: an iconic founder, artisanship, vertical integration, global reach, and a premium price. Let’s dig into each of these more deeply. 1. An Iconic Founder Nothing builds a self-expressive benefit

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to 1998. “When you wash and wax a car, it drives better, doesn’t it? Or at least it feels like it does.”24 3. Vertical Integration In the early 1980s, The Gap was a chain of pedestrian clothing stores stocked with records, as well as Levi’s and other casual clothes

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repeat itself, it does rhyme, as Mark Twain purportedly said. Among the Four, these eight factors are prevalent: product differentiation, visionary capital, global reach, likability, vertical integration, AI, accelerant, and geography. These factors provide an algorithm, rules for what it takes to become a trillion-dollar company. In our work at L2

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manslaughter of the truth on an unprecedented scale. It’s good to be prom queen. 5. Vertical Integration The fifth factor in the T Algorithm is the ability to control the consumer experience, at purchase, through vertical integration. All of the Four control their distribution. If they don’t produce the product, they source

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in 2016) and make it worse. Airbnb is the most likely “sharing” unicorn to become the Fifth Horseman. Their weakest point is their lack of vertical integration (they don’t own any apartments), meaning Airbnb doesn’t have the same degree of control over the customer experience as the Four. This warrants

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scalability, 24–25 sellers’ joining of, 166 stock appreciation of, 28, 28 and stores, 30, 31, 36, 43–45, 55, 56 and taxes, 34, 193 vertical integration of, 195 and Walmart, 228 Whole Foods acquisition, 44, 54, 55–56, 59 zero-click ordering, 31–32, 56 See also Bezos, Jeff analog moats

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taking, 68 secular worship of, 66–67 stores, 80–81, 82–83, 89, 91, 195–96 strategy for success, 57 and taxes, 83, 193, 197 vertical integration of, 195–96 vs. FBI, 63–64, 65–66 and Wozniak, 69, 88, 180 and Xerox’s GUI, 161, 166 See also iPhone; Jobs, Steve

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capital, 6, 6 and Snapchat, 109–10 success of, 4–5, 265–66 targeting of, 99–100, 106–7, 196 time spent on, 96, 97 vertical integration of, 195 virtual reality venture of, 113–14 and WhatsApp, 96, 97, 108, 111, 168 and Zuckerberg, 110–11, 114–15, 193 failure, 39, 40

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algorithm of, 105, 106, 130, 136–37, 147, 150, 151, 162, 176 server farms, 91 suspicious searches on, 135–36, 199 and taxes, 133–34 vertical integration of, 194–95 vulnerability of, 152–53 Graziano, Joseph, 81 grocery retailers, 58–59, 61 Grove, Andrew, 192 Hamilton, Alexander, 159–60 Harbinger Capital Partners

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status, 82–83 and irrational decision making, 174–75, 178–79 and price premium of, 83–86 sex appeal of, 178–79 Tesla, 214 and vertical integration, 79–80 See also Apple Ma, Jack, 206, 210 Manhattan Project, 267 marketing funnel, 98, 98 Mayer, Marissa, 161–62, 192–93 media and publishers

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and career accelerant capacity, 201–2 and geography, 202–3 and global reach, 190–91 and likability, 191–94 and product differentiation, 184–88 and vertical integration, 194–96 and visionary capital, 188–89 Targ, Elisabeth, 129 targeting of customers, 99–100, 106–7, 196–99 Tesla, 159, 210–13, 213, 229

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, 159–60, 267 US Congress, 154, 161–63, 192–93 US Department of Justice, 54, 154, 155, 158 value, 161, 185–86 Verizon, 228–29 vertical integration, 194–96 virtual reality, 114–15 Walmart and Alibaba, 206, 207 and Amazon, 59 and e-commerce, 45–47 Fifth Horseman potential of, 220–21

Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Civilization

by Parag Khanna  · 18 Apr 2016  · 497pp  · 144,283 words

through it. More connectivity creates a world beyond states, a global society greater than the sum of its parts. Much as the world evolved from vertically integrated empires to horizontally interdependent states, now it is graduating toward a global network civilization whose map of connective corridors will supersede traditional maps of national

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Europe, most observers have missed the enormous differences. European nations traded heavily across each other prior to World War I, but they did so as vertically integrated mercantile empires exploiting raw materials from their own vast colonies. They traded in finished goods and didn’t outsource production to each other; we did

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of NEC’s satellites to boost its market share against American and European firms. Today, Toyota City near Nagoya and Samsung Town in Seoul are vertically integrated ecosystems of research, design, management, and components—hundreds of companies treated as extensions of the mother ship itself. When countries compete, they do so with

The Silent Intelligence: The Internet of Things

by Daniel Kellmereit and Daniel Obodovski  · 19 Sep 2013  · 138pp  · 40,787 words

traditional reluctance of investors to enter this space. In the Internet of Things, opportunities in hardware spread from new energy- and cost-optimized silicon to vertically integrated devices for specific markets. There are tremendous opportunities in figuring out the whole data-acquisition space — sensor calibration and integration; hardware platforms, which would allow

The Price Is Wrong: Why Capitalism Won't Save the Planet

by Brett Christophers  · 12 Mar 2024  · 557pp  · 154,324 words

looked very, very different. ‘In most countries’, Michael Davidson and colleagues have observed, the electricity sector was dominated by ‘large-scale electricity companies’ that were ‘vertically integrated’, meaning that they ‘owned and controlled all [industry activities] under a single roof ’.5 Generation was not separated, in other words. Nor, generally, were these

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companies private. ‘Governments’, Davidson and his co-authors continued, ‘typically opted for public ownership and operation.’ Furthermore, these vertically integrated companies did not have to compete: they usually enjoyed what scholars (including Davidson) call ‘natural monopolies’, either at the national scale or sub-nationally.6

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of national electricity sectors – that is, the tendency for generation and other core industry activities increasingly to be separated from one another, and for the ‘vertically integrated’ entities referred to by Davidson and his co-authors thereby to be dis-integrated. This is followed by discussions of growing de-monopolization, privatization and

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half of the twentieth century that everything involved in getting electrical power to customers was aggregated commercially under one roof. In other words, a single, ‘vertically integrated’ entity controlled the entire supply chain, from generation through to distribution, and it charged customers a sufficient amount to cover all of the various costs

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number – at least 200 in generation and 1,150 in distribution – in France.13 If aggregation and consolidation of the electricity supply chain within single vertically integrated enterprises was not a feature of the industry’s early history, however, this was increasingly what transpired, in a process that was often – but not

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would be designed. What was needed, in short, was one or more larger, standardized and more efficient undertakings. In the event, the ensuing consolidation and vertical integration of the electricity industry occurred at varying geographical scales, and to varying degrees, in different territories. Consider, by way of example, the three countries whose

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emergent electricity sectors we have touched upon in the preceding paragraphs: France, the UK and the US. In France and the UK, vertical integration occurred at the national level, and specifically under public ownership. In the former territory, such integration would prove to be more or less total. Under

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and Wales.15 Where England and Wales differed materially from France was with regard to local distribution, which in England and Wales was exempted from vertical integration (but not from nationalization). The 1947 Act created twelve new publicly owned regional electricity boards, which purchased electricity from the CEGB and distributed and sold

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return on investment. To take one illustrative example, Florida was, in all the aforementioned respects, broadly typical. As recently as the late 1980s, five private, vertically integrated utilities – Florida Power & Light, Florida Power, Florida Public Utilities Company, Gulf Power, and Tampa Electric – controlled about four-fifths of the market; they were complemented

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by around fifty municipal utilities and rural cooperatives.16 Crystallizing in the middle decades of the twentieth century in most relatively mature electricity markets, this vertical-integration model ‘held’ as the dominant way of structuring the industry until relatively late in the century.17 It was generally not until the 1990s, and

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wider restructuring process. Again, the exact extent and manner of unbundling have varied greatly from place to place, just as the manner and extent of vertical integration itself had in the first place. Notably, dis-integration has frequently seeded not three but four separate commercial activities. Alongside enterprises specializing in generation, transmission

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(that is, most likely to be separately owned) of all. This stands to reason. In countries where the unbundling of generation from what were previously vertically integrated electricity sectors has been only partial, the bits of generating capacity that remain integrated with the rest of the supply chain tend disproportionately to be

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what is perhaps the most interesting question. Why? Why, that is, did countries around the world begin in the 1990s to unbundle what were ordinarily vertically integrated electricity sectors? Why do they continue to do so today? And why was the activity of generation a particular focus of these efforts? To provide

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, even if it were desirable (and many felt it was not), competition was simply not possible in the electricity sector. The sector was characterized by (vertically integrated) monopoly because monopoly was, effectively, inherent to it. Such monopoly was, to use the word used by economists, ‘natural’, meaning the lowest-cost – and hence

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remains negligible or zero retail competition. This includes countries ranging from Argentina to China. In the former, an electricity sector historically controlled by three dominant vertically integrated utilities was restructured beginning in the early 1990s, and while retail – as we have seen – remained wedded to monopolistic control of physical delivery, generation did

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discussed the fact that, in the middle decades of the twentieth century, in the face of fragmented and creaking infrastructure, there were widespread moves towards vertical integration of the electricity supply chain specifically under public ownership. France and the UK, implementing such a model in the 1940s, were exemplars. But some countries

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what the marketization of electricity clearly does require, meanwhile, is unbundling. After all, if electricity provision is controlled from beginning to end by a single, vertically integrated operator, then, by definition, a market – exchange between actors, plural – is not possible. Two important points flow from this. First, where the electricity sector has

…

not been unbundled, marketization has not occurred. Take, for example, regions such as the south-eastern US, across most of which vertically integrated utilities continue to enjoy private monopolies. Aside from small amounts of electricity that some such utilities source from third-party generators, prices are not set

…

of what development involves in practice is the fact that, as we saw in Chapter 2, most generators of solar and wind power are not vertically integrated into downstream parts of the electricity supply chain: they are not active in transmission, distribution or retail. There are, of course, exceptions, and important

…

would-be solar power generators – and the financial institutions that might provide them with capital – faced in that period. One such was Detroit Edison, a vertically integrated electricity company based in Michigan. In 1995, it proposed to build its first solar PV facility, with a peak capacity of 28 kW. It was

…

that sells the electricity (or smartphone) to the end user the same company that produces it? Or, to use the technical argot, is the industry vertically integrated? As we shall see, relative costs tend only to win out if it is. Second, there is a condition – obvious, when one thinks about

…

a good sense from Chapters 2 and 3 of what will become apparent. For, as we have seen, today’s electricity sector is typically not vertically integrated, even as historically it usually was. And, in various important respects, electricity is not just electricity: it makes a significant difference to the product

…

way to approach this question is to take two ideal type models of decision-making entities. In model 1, there is a single energy company, vertically integrated across the whole supply chain, which produces electricity and also distributes and retails it to end users. In model 2, there is a company whose

…

else being equal (which of course it almost never is – but we can ignore that for the time being for the sake of illustration), our vertically integrated company in model 1 will generate electricity renewably if the costs of doing so are lower than the costs of conventional generation. This stands to

…

electricity distributor without generating assets – say, Ambit Energy of the US, or one of India’s regional DISCOMs – look at the economics? Just like the vertically integrated company in model 1, it too cares solely about cost, and therefore buys the cheapest electricity possible – renewable electricity, that is, if in fact renewable

…

apply a substantially higher mark-up when selling wholesale? This is just one possible eventuality. The point, more generally, is that the distributor, unlike the vertically integrated energy company in model 1, does not have the option of itself generating the power renewably if the power is not for sale on the

…

that it has the necessary incentive to do so. Remember, here, that our independent producer’s decision matrix looks very different from that of the vertically integrated energy company (in model 1) or the electricity distributor (in model 2). The latter two typically have delivery obligations, and thus need to procure supply

…

not come even close to approximating to such smooth trade-offs. Were the real commercial world of electricity production and supply still aligned with the vertically integrated structure of model 1, then the price mechanism would perhaps see a cheaper source of electricity rapidly supplant a more expensive one – again, all other

…

interacts in important ways with the effect of industry structure discussed earlier. As we saw, it should in theory be in the interest of a vertically integrated electricity supplier always to use cheaper sources of generation, inasmuch as cheaper generation means higher profits. But what if that supplier has an existing fleet

…

of conventional generating plants of the type described by Roberts? Then the calculus potentially changes, as numerous recent cases involving such vertically integrated utilities in the US has made clear. In 2022, for example, the Iowa-based MidAmerican Energy, which serves more than 1.6 million customers across

…

renewables development, specifically for those actors predominantly active in the generation sector in any particular country, and specifically within the context of the industry structure – vertically integrated or not, competitive or not, and so forth – that prevails in that country. We know, that is, why the relative-prices explanatory orthodoxy is wrong

…

of the country, such as the south-east, there has been long-standing resistance to liberalization, and restructuring has been very limited. Still dominated by vertically integrated monopolists, these regions lack organized wholesale markets and pricing remains heavily regulated, albeit still linked – only in very different ways – to generating costs. In short

…

of the US. NextEra’s history, which dates to the 1920s, is primarily as a classic US regulated ‘power utility’, which is to say, a vertically integrated entity with a regional monopoly – in its case in Florida – in the generation, transmission, distribution and sale of electricity. But, around the turn of

…

corporate renewables PPAs has played out is the US – or, at least, those parts of the US where the conventional electricity industry operating model of vertically integrated regional monopolies has been swept away. Take Texas. From the earliest days of liberalization of the state’s electricity sector, utility PPAs were a cornerstone

…

, India’s electricity sector looks very, very different from the US’s. Where the latter is dominated – depending on the region – either by territorially delimited, vertically integrated monopoly suppliers or by wholesale spot markets featuring unbundled power producers and distributors, the former is dominated by bilateral, long-term power purchase agreements (PPAs

…

and 34 MW plant. They would each sell their output under twenty-five-year fixed-price PPAs signed with ZESCO, the country’s state-owned, vertically integrated electricity company, and the only buyer of power from independent producers. In hailing this outcome, protagonists, including the World Bank itself, emphasized two principal features

…

countries, especially in Europe, have previously taken. We examined the core components of this prototypically Western sectoral model in Chapter 2. It necessitates unbundling of vertically integrated operations. It entails, where possible, but especially in generation, the introduction of competition. It means more private ownership of operating assets. And, perhaps most challengingly

…

, 17. 14 C. T. Melling, ‘Nationalisation of Electricity Supply 1947: Reasons and Problems’, Engineering Science and Education Journal 7: 1 (1998), p. 12. 15 Separate vertically integrated companies enjoyed industry monopolies in Northern Ireland and Scotland – one (the Electricity Board for Northern Ireland) in the former and two (the South of Scotland

…

Electricity Board and the North of Scotland Hydro-Electric Board) in the latter. 16 Another country that featured sub-national vertically integrated monopolies was Germany, where, through the 1990s, nine such regional giants dominated the electricity industry. See S. G. Gross, Energy and Power: Germany in the

…

–4. 17 It was also a feature of many less mature markets: India, for example, in the 1950s and 1960s, established ‘state electricity boards’ as vertically integrated regional monopolies fully controlling generation, transmission and distribution. See S. S. Kale, Electrifying India: Regional Political Economies of Development (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014). 18

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2 obstacles to transformation 2–3 restructuring of 353–64 structure of 38–9 unbundling 39–40, 46–8, 49, 146, 348 United Kingdom 165 vertical integration 38–9, 43, 44–5, 54, 146 electricity supply chain 42–4 electricity systems, institutional arrangements xiv, 41–8 electricity use 4 electrification xviii–

…

) 283 solar and wind capacity growth 267, 268 solar power 31, 66, 72, 104 spot markets, electricity 168–9 unbundling of electricity sector 46–7 vertical integration 45n wind power 66 indirect decarbonization 10 Industrial Revolution 112–13, 135, 137–8 industrial sector, electricity consumption 4 industrialization 29, 30, 346 industry entry

…

Renewables Obligations (RO) 118, 188 seabed lease auction 204 ‘State of the Energy Market’ report 269 transmission charging 151–2 unbundling of electricity sector 46 vertical integration 44–5 wind market downturn 163–9, 174, 188 windfall taxes 333 withdrawal of support mechanisms 228 zero-subsidy renewables 269–70 zero-support renewables

…

credits xxvii, 94, 115, 184, 185–6, 196–8, 278–9, 280–2 Texas electricity crisis, 2021 307–12 unbundling of electricity sector 47–8 vertical integration 45 vested interests 130n wind farms 84–5 upstream exploration, revival in 217 urbanization 29, 30, 346 US Department of Energy 97, 235 US Energy

Virtual Competition

by Ariel Ezrachi and Maurice E. Stucke  · 30 Nov 2016

chapter are driven by the assumption that most of the future private assistants will be developed and provided by the super-platforms and other powerful, vertically integrated firms. Would there be any possible counter measure to these devious helpers? We certainly hope so. We can anticipate a class of independent assistants, developed

…

the evolutionary path tilts in favor of the Frenemy dynamic and the devious helper. Key here are data-driven network effects, Big Data, Big Analytics, vertical integration, bundling of ser vices, and interoperability, which all seem to favor the super-platforms. Let us explain in more detail: First, to excel in its

The Art of SEO

by Eric Enge, Stephan Spencer, Jessie Stricchiola and Rand Fishkin  · 7 Mar 2012

on a video in the results, and the video begins playing right there in the search results. As you can see, the vast variety of vertical integration into search results means that for many popular queries, returning the standard set of 10 links to external pages is no longer the rule. Engines

Vertical: The City From Satellites to Bunkers

by Stephen Graham  · 8 Nov 2016  · 519pp  · 136,708 words

?’55 Such a question goes to the heart of the politics of vertical urbanism, which, as Dutch architect Darrel Ronald suggests, ‘must represent a dynamic vertically integrated urban space of transportation, public space, landscape, infrastructure and interchanges.’56 Japanese architect Hiroshi Hara offers an intervention here. He argues that ‘rather than concentrating

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at various scales – ‘local’, ‘urban’, ‘regional’, ‘national’ and ‘international’ – as imagined across a flat geographic surface. See, for example, Mark Casson, Multinationals and World Trade: Vertical Integration and the Division of Labour in World Industries, London: Routledge, 2012; Cindy Fan, ‘The Vertical and Horizontal Expansions of China’s City System’, Urban Geography

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