Are there any non-competitive businesses?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

If non-competitive is the right word.

One thing that’s pissed me off ever since I was old enough to be pissed off was reading marketing crap that included phrases like, “in the ultra-competitive market of…” or “a leader in the competitive XXXX market,” “we’ve found ways to make the competitive environment work for us,” &c.

Of course, what I read is, “blah, blah, buzzword, I’m retarded, blah.” Of course, your industry is competitive, that’s because there’s money to be made in it.

Hell, there’s even competition in the MLB and between oil companies.

My question is, is there any industry/sector where there isn’t “fierce” competition?

Now, I don’t mean being an Eskimo ice salesman or being the only densist for 500 miles. I’m thinking about an entire industry.

2

The Catholic Church

The United States Government

3

Charities of any type? Not for Profit Organizations?

4

I dunno, they seem to have had some pretty serious challenges to their market share in the past and even recently.

While the business of America may be business, I was thinking more along the lines of a for-profit entity (I suppose the editorializing about Brand USA can begin).

5

Saudia airlines. They have a national monopoly here for inside-the-kingdom flights. Same for an other monopoly I guess.

6

National Public Radio affiliate stations. There is usually only one in any given market. They have no competition.

7

Buggy whips?

That’s an old saw.

Possibly your query might include businesses where one company has come to dominate the market. Microsoft does come to mind there, but despite their impressive presence, they don’t own the software world.

In more limited markets, where there’s still money to be made, but the public’s not a factor, conditions could, I suppose be described that way.

The seismic data brokerage market in North America is dominated by one privately held company. Their revenues make the people who see such quite happy campers. Their most serious competition is a publicly traded company that doesn’t really do exactly the same thing they do, although they both provide seismic data to exploration companies.

They can pretty much call the shots most of the time.

They have a handful of competitors (I’ll note they had literally hundreds of competitors 20-25 years ago). For those competitors, it is a ‘fiercely competitive’ market.

8

Well, MOST of the time, electric companies don’t face any real competition. I mean, if you live in New York City, you pretty much HAVE to get your electricity from Con Edison.

9

Ah, despite regulation, utilities are a good example. So’s the seismic data (who would have thought there was even an industry for that?).

10

City Hall?

The Post Service?

11

Setting aside monoplies casued by, or abetted by, regulation (e.g. utility companies), competiveness of markets can be modeled as a function of barriers to entry and barriers to customers switching.

if it’s very hard / expensive for somebody to enter a market then that’s a relatively uncompetitive market. For example, to try to duplicate FedEx’s domestic US service today from scratch would be prohibitive. Fedex does have competitors, but they’re not nearly as worried about new entrants as is, say, United Airlines, even though both are in the transport-stuff-from-here-to-there-by-air business.

The second point is a little more subtle. At the first level you’ve got the question of how easy is it for customers to switch to a direct competitor. If XYZ Corp uses Fedex, how hard is it for them to switch to UPS? Not very, unless they’re a big business (say Land’ End) with a lot of deeply embedded interconnections between Fedex & my processes.

The real meat is at the second level: how easily can customers stop using any product like mine? Fedex started out making most of its income from carrying documents from one law firm or government agency to another. A huge slice of that traffic is now electronic.

Fedex’es mix of paper-based cargo versus tangible goods has gone from 80/20 to 20/80 over the years. Email is trmendous competition for the paper, and zero competition for the tangible goods.

Finally, competitiveness of markets is a spectrum, from highly competitve to almost wholly uncompetitve. People make a very basic error in thinking which clouds the rest of the argument, when they take a full-spectrum value and unconsciously convert it to a binary value, “competitve” or “uncompetitive”.

Having said all that, there are many largely uncompetitve markets out there, where one or two incumbents have the market to themselves and enjoy fat margins. The situation is not long-term stable, but it can last for many many years. This company http://www.pelco.com/ , for example, has a near-monopoly on supplying outdoor security cameras in the USA.

At a local level you can get de-facto monopolies such as the only restuarant in a small town or the only road construction company in a county. They’re somewhat price-constrained by the customer’s knowledge of competitor’s prices not too far away.

Others, like Pelco, remain almost alone since the national market isn’t large enough to justify a conglomerate moving in, but it’s too big for a start-up to get enough financing to break open.

12

Examples in this area are environmental consultants - those who help you go about obtaining a 404 permit. There’s only two companies which perform this work here; there’s plenty of work to go around for both. They don’t even advertise, just go by word of mouth. However, I don’t think anyone’s getting rich off of it.

13

Major league sports: MLB, NFL, NBA…

They have competition between the teams, but not at the league level.

14

I was at a skydiving business in Taupo NZ this week - at their airport they have 3 companies offering basically the same service (in fact the other 2 were set up by staff of the original one). I talked about this with the marketing manager - she said that there were enough customers to go around, and in fact it helped make this town a centre for skydiving which brought in business from people backpacking around Australasia - people now wait to get to Taupo to skydive. So I wouldn’t classify these businesses as highly competitive within their region.