Inspired by Zack Kanter's epic read on Why Amazon is eating the world, earlier this summer I put together a hypothetical deck on the future of Majid Al Futtaim, one of the Middle East's largest mall, retail and leisure operators.
From the archive
The Future of Majid Al Futtaim
From the archiveOriginally published 2nd July 2017. This post reflects its original context and may contain information that is no longer current.
Preserved from blog.omarkassim.com.
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You joined MAF?
Heh, nope. Hence, hypothetical :)
You do a great job of putting yourself in their shoes, Omar! I wonder though whether Amazon's Service Oriented Architecture would be a suitable alternative for a non-technology business like MAF.
The core question, as you rightly point out, is "what do you do with the physical infrastructure?". A key nuance to consider is that this isn't just *any* physical space, but gobs of *expensive* real-estate in central locations.
I would argue that their core asset today is not the space itself, but the foot traffic that passes through that space. That is what the stores in the mall are paying the big $'s for.
A transition would mean exchanging this foot traffic for something else, whatever that may be.
For instance, in some arbitrary future of my concoction, let's say restaurants find the Mall of Emirates to be the perfect location for creating a central kitchen where they could serve the whole of Dubai. MAF decides to turn the entire mall into an efficient service center for restaurants .. and all of the restaurants in Dubai relocate to the Mall of Emirates creating one mega-food court but, without the walk-in customers ... The restaurants rely on the delivery services provided by the mall to get the food to customers efficiently and *quickly*. If MAF makes more $'s/m2 from this arrangement than their current one, they've successfully circumnavigated disruption (for now). Of course, they would still need to weather the transition point where they would kill all of their precious foot traffic.
"Team of 35+ available to hire immediately"
Was it just hypothetical?
A hypothetical team may have been available to execute a hypothetical proposition ;)