Consolidation

This article at the Economist was music to my ears. Many American sectors have been consolidating at a rapid pace:

Since 1997 market concentration has risen in two-thirds of American industries. A tenth of the economy is made up of industries in which four firms control more than two-thirds of the market. In a healthy economy you would expect profits to be competed down, but the free cashflow of companies is 76% above its 50-year average, relative to gdp. In Europe the trend is similar, if less extreme. The average market share of the biggest four firms in each industry has risen by three percentage points since 2000. On both continents, dominant firms have become harder to dislodge.

Incumbents scoff at the idea that they have it easy. However consolidated markets become domestically, they argue, globalisation keeps heating the furnace of competition. But in industries that are less exposed to trade, firms are making huge returns. We calculate the global pool of abnormal profits to be $660bn, more than two-thirds of which is made in America, one-third of that in technology firms (see Special report).

and this consolidation has costs:

Not all these rents are obvious. Google and Facebook provide popular services at no cost to consumers. But through their grip on advertising, they subtly push up the costs of other firms. Several old-economy industries with high prices and fat profits lurk beneath the surface of commerce: credit cards, pharmaceutical distribution and credit-checking.

During the California Gold Rush relatively few great fortunes were made panning for gold but several were made in selling tools and other supplies to prospectors. The same is true in the retail gold rush. Jeff Bezos isn’t making money in retail. He’s making it selling retailers the tools to help them go online.

I like the Economist’s prescriptions, too:

Market power should be attacked in three ways. First, data and intellectual-property regimes should be used to fuel innovation, not protect incumbents. That means liberating individual users of tech services to take their information elsewhere. It also entails requiring big platforms to license anonymised bulk data to rivals. Patents should be rarer, shorter and easier to challenge in court.

Second, governments should tear down barriers to entry, such as non-compete clauses, occupational licensing requirements and complex regulations written by industry lobbyists. More than 20% of American workers must hold licences in order to do their jobs, up from just 5% in 1950.

Third, antitrust laws must be made fit for the 21st century. There is nothing wrong with trustbusters’ remit to promote consumer welfare. But regulators need to pay more attention to the overall competitive health of markets and to returns on capital. America’s regulators should have more powers, as Britain’s do, to investigate markets that are becoming dysfunctional. Big tech firms should find it much harder to neutralise potential long-term rivals, as Facebook did when it acquired Instagram in 2012 and WhatsApp in 2014.