Everyone's Asking the Wrong Question About Data Centres with Ollie Hill

yeah speaking of that like business model innovation i think there's a there's a massive place to play in terms of business model innovation in this space because one of the problems is we're just using the oldest business model that's existed because i i spend capital i make a bunch of invest r&d and i make a thing and then i divide the number of things i can make per year over a time span with the number of times i think i can sell it and then i add a margin This

is

the most boring but effective business model there is, right? And when you look at a company like Schneider, what's your turnover globally? 40, 50 billion?

Euros is just over 40 billion.

Market cap is 160 billion.

It's about, is that euros? Yeah,

so that's

just under the entire GDP of New Zealand.

It's about 300 billion and New Zealand's GDP is about 400 billion.

When I say just under, I just mean 100 billion.

You know, I round in Elon math.

But it's a very strong balance sheet.

You're in a 190-year-old business.

You're probably actually more reliable than a bank.

There are probably not even banks that have lasted 190 years.

And so how do you get consumers into...

Because it's kind of hard and complicated.

Is there a way to change the business model so that the consumer locks in a contract but doesn't have any capital and the contract transfers with the property that the thing's on? There has to be a little bit more interesting space to play.

And even the idea of quoting, could you flip that on its head by having a channel to market that's like...

Here's a whole bunch of questions.

The channel provider, you know, like compareaconditioners.com has a whole bunch of technicians and you go on there and you pay a hundred bucks and a technician comes out, does all the specification photos and everything, goes back to this online channel and then people puts a tender out to like 10 or 15 people.

you know like that yeah i think how do you make it easier

there are some interesting um uh models overseas like using blockchain to be able to um sell energy to your neighbors instead of selling it back to the grid you know so you've got like community-based energy so instead of

cottage market

so instead of instead of like you know selling uh back to the the grid it 11 cents a kilowatt you're selling it to your neighbor at 20 cents because it's less than they would pay from the energy company so i think there's some really interesting models there um where you can actually get better return on investment for your individual capital as well um yeah it's it's a really complex industry because there are so many layers to it um and you know you've got uh your home electrician um and there's you know many thousands of those and their own small businesses and they buy off uh you know the wholesalers who then but yeah it's quite a complex system and it's not an easy one to just uh oh hey we'll just go down this other path so you really need some creativity there I think businesses need the same as well you're starting to see this how do we get people duly rewarded for being in a dynamic situation we're starting to see dairy farmers really get into this as well because hey if you've got no electricity and you can't process your milk You've got real big problems.