microbig: follow-up
first, it annoys me that you can’t reblog your own post. see below for the precursor to this post.
second, my friend zander was kind enough to point me to an interesting candidate for the distinction of “microbig”: paul, a bakery in france.
paul is a well-known brand in france with over three hundred bakeries throughout the country. they just recently opened their first bakeries in america and their global presence is expanding: they have around 100 shops outside of france. in their most recent company information sheet, they claim to serve over 5 million customers per month. let’s stop now to formulate our first (admittedly imprecise) requirement for being a microbig:
1. significant involvement in the lives of over 1 million people
now, let’s examine their impact on the world’s financial ecosystem. because paul is privately held by the holder groupe, we can’t inspect their financial results, though they do offer information on their market size. according to paul, as of 2001, the bakery and pastry products market totals 8.2 billion euros, with 54% of the market going to bread and 36% to pastries (don’t ask about the remaining 10%, apparently). of this market, artisanal businesses account for 71%. i have no idea where they get these statistics from, so let’s pretend they don’t exist. instead, we’ll look at a related company: panera bread.
panera’s an interesting company; i first learned about their history from my friend brian a few weeks ago. au bon pain was founded in 1978. in 1994, they bought a company called the st. louis bread company. in 1999, they rebranded the st. louis bread company offerings outside of st. louis as “panera bread company” in an attempt to give the chain national appeal. at the same time, they sold off all of their non-panera divisions, including au bon pain, and renamed the company “panera bread company”.
anyways, on to their financials: as i write, NASDAQ:PNRA has a market capitalization of USD$1.56 billion. a sizable company, certainly, but not a giant. they pull in over USD$1 billion a year in revenues but only scratch out USD$57 million in income after taxes. that’s pretty miniscule. i’m not really sure i want to focus on income/earnings, however; panera has a pretty sizable impact on the financial ecosystem given their revenue, financing activities, franchising program, and real estate dealings.
so, let’s formulate a second imprecise criterion for being a microbig:
2. annual revenues of under USD $100 million dollars
this clearly is not a perfect metric but i want to start somewhere. does paul qualify, then? well, according to their corporate website, panera has 1,168 locations, 493 of which are company-owned. given that franchises account for significantly less revenue than company-owned locations, and given that paul has approximately 400 locations worldwide, i would expect that paul is at least within an order of magnitude of panera’s revenues. thus, they’re not a microbig.
further consideration of what constitutes a microbig makes me think we need one more criterion to match gillmor’s intended usage:
3. people are aware of the involvement of the microbig in their life
thus we can rule out parts suppliers and other silent microbigs and just focus on those with widespread mindshare who lack a significant proximal impact on our financial ecosystem.
note that both paul and panera make physical goods and require a physical presence to distribute these goods. i am thining we’ll find microbigs elsewhere, delivering bits rather than atoms. ubiquitous platforms for the delivery of bits include televisions, movie theaters, mobile phones, personal computers, and perhaps digitized billboards, among others.
so, yeah: any thoughts on good candidates in these domains?
