News

Seattle | Amazon has abruptly stopped buying products from many of its wholesalers, sowing panic.

The company is encouraging vendors to instead sell directly to consumers on its marketplace. Amazon makes more money that way by offloading the cost of purchasing, storing and shipping products. Meanwhile, Amazon can charge suppliers for these services and take a commission on each transaction, which is much less risky than buying goods outright.

The company is determined to boost profits at the core e-commerce business, even if that means disrupting relationships with long-time suppliers. Because many suppliers source products from manufacturers months in advance, they will have to quickly shift their sales tactics if the expected Amazon orders don't come in.

 

Amazon is determined to boost profits at its core e-commerce business, even if that means disrupting relationships with long-time suppliers. Robert Bumsted

"If you're heavily reliant on Amazon, which a lot of these vendors are, you're in a lot of trouble," said Dan Brownsher, Chief Executive Officer of Channel Key, a Las Vegas e-commerce consulting business with more than 50 clients that sell more than $US100 million $142 million) of goods on Amazon annually. "If this goes on, it can put people out of business."

Mr Brownsher is among several consultants who said Amazon's move had affected thousands of vendors.

Pushing more suppliers onto the marketplace is part of Amazon's larger effort to reduce overheads by getting more suppliers to use an automated self-service system that requires no input from Amazon managers.

"We regularly review our selling partner relationships and may make changes when we see an opportunity to provide customers with improved selection, value and convenience," Amazon said in an emailed statement, declining to answer specific questions about the action.

The abrupt cancellation of orders prompted panic this week at the ShopTalk retail conference that drew more than 8000 retailers, brands and consultants to Las Vegas.

Some attendees said Amazon stopped submitting routine orders last week for a variety of products, often without explanation. The drought continued this week, affecting more vendors and leaving them frustrated about the lack of communication from Amazon.

One vendor who has been selling products to Amazon for five years said he got a canned response when he inquired why his routine weekly purchase order never came through. The response gave him no clarity about his standing as a vendor, he said.

In recent years, Amazon has increasingly prioritised its marketplace. More than half of all products sold on Amazon in 2018 came from marketplace merchants, and revenue providing services to those merchants is growing at double the pace of revenue from the online store. Based on the target valuation of Amazon, the marketplace business is worth about $US250 billion, according to Evercore ISI analyst Anthony DiClemente, more than double the value of the online retail business.

Online marketplaces can offer greater selection than even the biggest of stores. Walmart, Target and Best Buy are all copying Amazon's marketplace model to increase online sales. Amazon will generate e-commerce revenue of $US317 billion this year, representing 52.4 per cent of all online sales in the US, according to EMarketer.

"If you're already drawing eyeballs to your website, you want to have all of the products your customers are looking for," said Frank Poore, CEO of CommerceHub, which sells online marketplace software. "You have to have a bigger assortment online than you do in the store."

Now more Amazon vendors will be forced to sell on the marketplace or risk getting stuck with unsold inventory, said Will Land, CEO of Marketplace Valet, an e-commerce logistics provider and consulting firm in Riverside, California.

"When you get used to those big cheques," he said, "it's hard to pull away."

Online retailer Kogan.com has blamed its beefed-up marketing campaign and warehouse expansion for a fall in earnings over the past six months to December 31.

The online retailer boosted its marketing expenditure by 22.1 per cent to $11.6 million. Its warehousing expenses also grew 58.3 per cent to $6.5 million over the period and bumped up its inventory by 85 per cent to $92.9 million.

"We have continued our significant investments in our improved customer offering. We now have a nationwide logistics network, enabling us to delight customers all over Australia with faster and more cost-efficient delivery options," founder Ruslan Kogan wrote in a statement to investors.

Kogan said its inventory and marketing strategy was behind its 10.6 per cent revenue boost to $231.8 million in the past six months of 2018.

The shopping website spends $22 in marketing per online buyer, who return an average of $55 in gross profit. Kogan said it would continue to closely monitor its return on investment in marketing.

Earnings swipe

However, the strategy took a swipe at earnings for the half year, with Kogan reporting earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation of $13.3 million, 7.7 per cent lower than the first six months of 2017-2018. However, this surpassed Canaccord Genuity analyst Owen Humphries' prediction of $12.5 million.

Kogan reported a net profit after tax of $7.4 million, 11 per cent less than the prior corresponding period.

Despite the up-front costs, Kogan said it expected efficiencies from the strategy would start to kick in by June 30.

Kogan's share price has fallen 49 per cent in the past year, closing at $4.39 on Thursday. By comparison, the benchmark S&P/ASX 200 has risen 3.2 per cent. However, its share price jumped to $4.45 by midday following the results announcement on Friday.

Shareholders will be paid a 6.1¢ interim dividend on May 8.

 

Samsung's long-awaited folding phone will be known as the Galaxy Fold and will come out in the first half of 2019, Samsung said.

Speaking at the launch of Samsung's flagship Galaxy S10 phones here in San Francisco, Samsung officials teased out a few more details about their soon-to-be-launched foldable, which they say will help define the next ten years in mobile phones the way the Galaxy phones helped define the last 10 years, selling more than 2 billion units since they were first launched.

In the US, the Galaxy Fold will sell from $US1980, starting April 26. But Australian pricing and release dates had yet to be determined, Samsung Australia officials said.

 

 

The new phone, which Samsung has been working on since 2011, will feature a 7.3-inch Dynamic OLED display similar to the display that has gone into the Galaxy S10, except that on the Galaxy Fold the display flexes in the middle, to allow the phone to shut around it.

When the phone is closed, a 4.6-inch OLED screen on the front of the device will turn on and act as the phone's main screen, allowing it to operate more or less like a regular mobile phone, albeit a rather thick one.

Opened up, the Galaxy Fold will be just 6.9 mm thick, which is thinner than a 7.8-mm-thick Galaxy S10+.

But closed, the Fold will be 17mm thick on the side with the screen fold, and just under 14mm thick on the side where the edges meet, giving the phone a slight wedge shape that could make it risky to carry in your back pants pocket, where you might sit on it.

Because the OLED screen can't bend sharply enough to forms a neat crease, there will be a 3.2mm gap of air on the thick edge, rather like an old-fashioned ring binder, which could allow the screen to crack if too much weight forces that gap to narrow.

But Samsung officials say that part of the reason it's taken them so long to develop a foldable phone was that it took them ages to invent a screen that was flexible enough to fold, but strong enough not to break easily. The hinge on the Fold is reinforced with metal gearing, to stop it collapsing under weight.

Though it's flexible, the display will feel much like the glass-covered display on a regular phone, when the user goes to interact with it, officials said.

At its software developer conference last year, Samsung announced that it had been working closely with Google to develop a version of the Android operating system that works well with folding phones.

The version of Android that will come with the Galaxy Fold will allow users to view and use three apps at the same time on the 7.3-inch screen when the phone is opened, with at least one of those apps seamlessly transferring to the smaller screen on the front when the phone is closed.

At the Unpacked launch, Samsung executives showed off the three-app layout, which appeared to have one large app to the left of the display, and then two smaller apps in a column at the right hand side.

The inner screen will have an aspect ratio of 4:3, like an old-fashioned CRT TV on its side, officials revealed, giving each app an unusual aspect ratio of 4:9 if the three apps were stacked top-to-bottom. But the layout that Samsung showed off, with one large app and two small apps, gave each app a more natural aspect ratio. 

Other details include: Wireless PowerShare, that will let other phone users recharge their phones just by sitting them on the Fold; 12GB of RAM, which will be required if three apps are to be used at once on the big screen; six cameras, including three on the rear, one on the front and two on the inside; and the fact that the phone will initially released as a 4G variant only.

5G versions of the Fold might exist, but they won't be coming to Australia, at least not at first, Samsung officials said.

The price and the exact release date have yet to be revealed.

Detroit | Rivian Automotive founder RJ Scaringe approached deep-pocketed Saudi investors in late 2011 with an audacious proposal.

The young entrepreneur confessed he had no experience running a company.

He admitted his initial prototype - a battery-powered sports car much like Tesla's Roadster - was the wrong idea, and planned to build a pickup instead.

Of course Scaringe didn't have a truck to show then.

What he did have was something in common with Mohammed Abdul Latif Jameel, the chairman of a Saudi auto distributor who, like Scaringe, also attended Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Scaringe showed up recommended by MIT contacts, and playing the alumni card worked.

After a series of meetings pitching clean-running pickups and SUVs in hotels around Europe, he sealed a deal in early 2012 for $US5 million in funding to get Rivian Automotive in gear.

"It was a seminal point," Scaringe, 36, said in an interview. "They recognised the passion I had. A big part of it was building trust in me."

Rivian had another seminal moment Friday, when it announced a $US700 million ($982 million) funding round led by Amazon.com.

Scaringe also is in talks with General Motors on some kind of partnership with the largest US auto maker, as well, said people familiar with the matter.

Scaringe has spent the past seven years developing a pickup and sport utility vehicle that'll be built off a common electric-battery platform that could be used for other models in the future.

In exchange for leading the bulk of the $US1.15 billion in investment Rivian has drawn so far, Amazon will get a minority stake in the company.

The EV platform, which Scaringe prefers to refer to as a "skateboard", is a big part of his vision to deliver fat returns to those who've backed him.

In addition to selling his own trucks and SUVs, he's open to selling the technology to others for myriad applications, such as stationary batteries.

"There's another aspect to our business, which is leveraging our skateboard architecture and platform for non-Rivian products, which allows us to play in other spaces outside of our own brand and access other customers," Scaringe said.

In this sense, Scaringe is similar to Tesla chief executive officer Elon Musk, who's opened up the company's patents for use to help develop electric cars.

The two differ, though, in their willingness to let veterans of the auto industry help get their companies rolling.

Whereas Musk sought to reinvent carmaking with extensive use of automation - an ambition that contributed to repeated delays in getting the lower-priced Model 3 sedan to market - Scaringe has eagerly poached from big conventional car makers' manufacturing, engineering and design departments.

"He's taken time to learn from everyone's mistakes, and he's going after a market that is still growing," Tony Posawatz, an auto industry consultant who developed the Chevrolet Volt plug-in hybrid for GM, said of Scaringe.

Much of Rivian's workforce of about 750 employees is spread across California and Michigan, with automated driving and software engineers in San Jose, battery geeks in Irvine, and traditional auto engineers just outside Detroit. It also has a small office in the UK.

The company acquired its Normal, Illinois, assembly plant from Mitsubishi Motors in 2017 for $US16 million and was able to re-purpose some of the equipment the Japanese auto maker left behind.

Rivian's vice president of manufacturing, Matt Tall, came from AM General, the maker of Humvees for the military and the Hummer SUVs GM once sold to civilians.

Jeff Hammoud, VP of design, is a veteran of Fiat Chrysler's Jeep.

In an interview before the Amazon announcement, Scaringe declined to comment on that deal, or on any discussions with GM.

He did say Rivian's backers, which include Japan's Sumitomo and Britain's Standard Chartered, are committed.

"We will bring on additional partners, but less because of capital reasons and more because of a need to have strategic relationships as we scale towards our broader vision," he said.

If Scaringe is able to land outside investment from several giants of the auto and technology sectors, he'll be making more Musk-like moves.

Tesla sold stakes to Daimler and Toyota and partnered with them on joint electric-vehicle projects to help weather the recession, though both have since parted ways.

China's Tencent Holdings ranks among the Model 3 maker's top shareholders.

Buy-in from Amazon and others will hand Scaringe the cash to help bring Rivian's R1T pickup to market on time next year.

The investment also carries with it the potential for the world's largest online retailer to eventually become a customer.

Amazon has been building out a fleet of vehicles bearing its brand to handle deliveries for its wildly popular Prime service.

A car buff since his youth, Scaringe grew up on Florida's Space Coast in Melbourne, near Cape Canaveral.

Like his father, he has a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering. He rebuilt a 1957 Porsche Speedster in his youth and dreamed of starting a car company.

While earning his master's and doctorate from MIT, where he was a member of the Sloan Automotive Laboratory's research team, Scaringe had an environmental awakening.

According to official company lore, he spent his free time hiking, carried around his own fork and spoon, dried his laundry on clotheslines strung around his apartment and biked to class, even in the winter.

In class, Scaringe was relatively quiet and well liked by his peers, said Wai Cheng, a professor of mechanical engineering who supervised him.

"He's an extremely nice guy, except when you play basketball with him," Cheng said of how other students described Scaringe.

"He's not an aggressive guy, but he's very competitive."

Scaringe went through several names for the company after founding it in 2009.

It was called Mainstream Motors on an interim basis and received seed capital from Florida-based Mainstream Engineering, a company his father owned.

It briefly went by Avera Motors until South Korea's Hyundai complained this sounded too much like its Azera sedan.

Scaringe settled on Rivian in 2011.

Back when its headquarters was near Cape Canaveral, Rivian got an early leg up from $US3.5 million in state funding.

That included financing from Florida's aerospace economic development organisation, which invested about $US1.5 million in return for stock warrants that it has yet to exercise.

"Obviously, we would have liked them to have built a giant car factory on the Space Coast, but ultimately we expect them to develop technology" that will prove useful to the space program, said Dale Ketcham, a spokesman for Space Florida.

At a briefing for journalists in November, Scaringe said Rivian was looking to do for autos what Patagonia has done for outdoor clothing, aiming for an upscale but utility-focused consumer.

His goal is to make a pickup and SUV that are premium and give buyers a spirit of adventure, but with clean emissions and great technology, including over-the-air updates.

If he delivers, Musk's success suggests Scaringe has a chance to be greeted with broad appeal.

"Tesla did an outstanding job," Scaringe said.

"They pulled customers out of luxury cars and even the Toyota Prius.

"You'll see us pulling people out of Land Rovers, BMWs, Subarus and Teslas."

- with Chester Dawson and Gabrielle Coppola

Bloomberg

Being a digital business is just a part of doing business according to Jen Geale, the co-founder of Mountain Bikes Direct.

Geale and her co-founders started the online bike business after running a local bike shop in Brisbane.

"We saw people shopping on line and we wanted a piece of that pie," she told the Oracle and Netsuite Suiteconnect conference in Sydney last week.

Mountain Bikes Direct has operated online since it first launched in 2012 and digital transformation hasn't really been on the agenda.

The business turns over more than $4 million a year and employs 14 staff who all work remotely.

"The shift we have seen is of our customer base to research digitally before they engage our sales people," says Geale. "We see 70 per cent of customers have researched the problem beforehand. For us it is about using technology to assist us reaching our customers where they are making a decision."

Buzz words

Business is digital now, whether operations are purely online or as both a physical and virtual businesses according to enterprise software company NetSuite.

Jason Maynard, senior vice president of global field operations at Oracle Netsuite says phrases such as 'digital transformation' are outdated.

"I don't even know what it means anymore when someone says digital transformation," he says. "The tech industry is so focused on these buzz words. We are not using the words digital transformation," he says. "We have been in the cloud since 1998 we have 16,000 customers we are not really transforming to be digital, we did it 20 years ago."

Maynard says Oracle NetSuite's customers, which include many small businesses such as Mountain Bikes Direct, are also beyond digital transformation.

"I think as tech vendors we are all guilty of the shiny object syndrome to hype things up as the next big thing," he says. "We are all trying to solve business problems, these are human problems how do you hire a great team … how do you grow the bottom line. Don't get sucked into these buzz words."

Digitally native

Fresh food delivery service YouFoodz is another business that has relied on digital channels from its inception.

The business sells healthy food via home delivery and through retailers and has experienced 500 per cent growth in the past year with a turnover of more than $100 million.

Chief technology oficer Myles Lawlor says the technology used to make tens of thousands of meals every day is "incredibly complicated".

"To scale it, I am getting some grey hairs, a lot of grey hairs," he says.

However Lawlor also avoids phrases such as digital transformation.

"I am one of these guys that hates the word digital because it takes away from all the work everyone is doing in the business," he says. "We assume it is a thing rather than a way of thinking. When we talk about digital we say that is listening to the customers. We are obsessive about listening to the customers."

Brisbane based YouFoodz was founded by Lance Giles six years ago and Lawlor describes the business as a "digitally native company".

"It is a young business both in age and some of the people who work here are constantly delivering new functions and new marketing mechanisms," he says.  "But ultimately it is all about the food."

HSBC has appointed a new head of retail banking and wealth management effective immediately to help build a bigger retail presence. 

Jessica Power will be part of the banks efforts to increase its presence in retail banking by assisting domestic and international customers with their mortgages, bank accounts, credit cards and other financial needs. 

Ms Power has over 23 years’ experience in the industry, most recently as state manager metro NSW for Westpac. Prior to that, she worked at Citigroup Australia for 19 years in various roles. 

Ms Power replaces Graham Heunis who has taken on a new role as head of Asia-Pacific sales management, retail banking and wealth management. 

HSBC Australia’s chief executive officer Martin Tricaud said that under Ms Power’s leadership the bank would see its growth efforts come to fruition. 

Catch Group chief executive Nati Harpaz believes Catch’s half-yearly figures posted yesterday “speak for themselves”.

“We’ve had an unbelievable six months from July to December which beat even our most optimistic forecasts,” Harpaz told IR.

Much of the 62 per cent sales growth is due to Catch’s execution of its marketing strategy, as well as the growing range of products available to customers across its online marketplace.

“If your range is 40,000 products, you might be giving your customer a reason to shop with you once or twice every 12 months,” Harpaz said.

“[But], when you grow that range to two million products, for example, all of a sudden that customer…has a reason to come back more often and shop again.”

Harpaz said the increased product range also means Catch is losing fewer customers to its competitors. Active customers jumped to 1.36 million at the end of the second quarter in FY19 – 54 per cent higher than the same quarter last year.

The company has launched several new marketing initiatives over the past six months to introduce its offering to new customers. One of the biggest was the opening of a physical pop-up store at Chadstone shopping centre.

“Initially, when we looked at [the store] we thought about how we could make the experience very digital, allowing self check-out and integration between online and bricks-and-mortar,” Harpaz said.

“But we realised during the [holiday] period, you just want to make it very, very easy for customers to grab the product, pay, and leave the store. No one wants to spend time widgeting and playing around with things.”

As the weeks moved closer the Christmas, Catch focused on reducing friction in the shopping experience and expanded the size of the store to stock more product and offer more checkouts and customers into the space.

While the initial Chadstone pop-up closed, Catch has signed on to relaunch the store, in a smaller capacity, within the centre for another six months.

The new store will offer click-and-collect, but it will be more focused on curation of stock, featuring the best products from online and deciding if they will also sell in a bricks-and-mortar environment.

“Choosing the right stock to be on the shelves makes a difference. Usually a retailer puts something on the shelf and it’s stuck there for months until it sells,” Harpaz said.

“We have the luxury to be able to pull things that don’t work out, on a daily basis, put it in the warehouse and replace it with other products.”

Catch Group’s 22,000sqm warehouse, opened in october of 2018, will be a key component in the second half of FY19, enabling the retailer to hold more stock, and therefore, allowing Catch to improve its in-stock range moving forward.

Additionally, while Catch Marketplace has curated its range down to a more manageable 1.7 million products, the group has plans to grow that number further.

“Marketplace can grow into millions of SKUs, but it has to be the right SKUs,” Harpaz said.

“We want to be differentiated by the other marketplaces by making sure that what we put on our site is very relevant to our business.”

Further incentives to Catch’s membership program, Club Catch, are in the pipeline as well, as the brand moves closer to hitting $1 billion in sales – a challenge for the business set by Harpaz several years ago.

“We’re getting closer, probably the fact that we took Scoopon out of the business made a change [but] we are really on track to grow significantly over the next 12 to 24 months,” Harpaz said.

“We’ll definitely get there.”

Detroit | Rivian Automotive founder RJ Scaringe approached deep-pocketed Saudi investors in late 2011 with an audacious proposal.

The young entrepreneur confessed he had no experience running a company.

He admitted his initial prototype - a battery-powered sports car much like Tesla's Roadster - was the wrong idea, and planned to build a pickup instead.

 

Rivian's common electric-battery platform could be used for other models in the future. 

Of course Scaringe didn't have a truck to show then.

What he did have was something in common with Mohammed Abdul Latif Jameel, the chairman of a Saudi auto distributor who, like Scaringe, also attended Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Scaringe showed up recommended by MIT contacts, and playing the alumni card worked.

After a series of meetings pitching clean-running pickups and SUVs in hotels around Europe, he sealed a deal in early 2012 for $US5 million in funding to get Rivian Automotive in gear.

"It was a seminal point," Scaringe, 36, said in an interview. "They recognised the passion I had. A big part of it was building trust in me."

Rivian had another seminal moment Friday, when it announced a $US700 million ($982 million) funding round led by Amazon.com.

 

Rivian Automotive founder RJ Scaringe at the Los Angeles Auto Show with singer Rhianna.  USA TODAY

Scaringe also is in talks with General Motors on some kind of partnership with the largest US auto maker, as well, said people familiar with the matter.

Scaringe has spent the past seven years developing a pickup and sport utility vehicle that'll be built off a common electric-battery platform that could be used for other models in the future.

In exchange for leading the bulk of the $US1.15 billion in investment Rivian has drawn so far, Amazon will get a minority stake in the company.

The EV platform, which Scaringe prefers to refer to as a "skateboard", is a big part of his vision to deliver fat returns to those who've backed him.

In addition to selling his own trucks and SUVs, he's open to selling the technology to others for myriad applications, such as stationary batteries.

"There's another aspect to our business, which is leveraging our skateboard architecture and platform for non-Rivian products, which allows us to play in other spaces outside of our own brand and access other customers," Scaringe said.

In this sense, Scaringe is similar to Tesla chief executive officer Elon Musk, who's opened up the company's patents for use to help develop electric cars.

The two differ, though, in their willingness to let veterans of the auto industry help get their companies rolling.

 

The Rivian R1T. The EV platform, which Scaringe prefers to refer to as a "skateboard", is a big part of his vision to deliver fat returns to those who've backed him.  

Whereas Musk sought to reinvent carmaking with extensive use of automation - an ambition that contributed to repeated delays in getting the lower-priced Model 3 sedan to market - Scaringe has eagerly poached from big conventional car makers' manufacturing, engineering and design departments.

"He's taken time to learn from everyone's mistakes, and he's going after a market that is still growing," Tony Posawatz, an auto industry consultant who developed the Chevrolet Volt plug-in hybrid for GM, said of Scaringe.

Much of Rivian's workforce of about 750 employees is spread across California and Michigan, with automated driving and software engineers in San Jose, battery geeks in Irvine, and traditional auto engineers just outside Detroit. It also has a small office in the UK.

The company acquired its Normal, Illinois, assembly plant from Mitsubishi Motors in 2017 for $US16 million and was able to re-purpose some of the equipment the Japanese auto maker left behind.

 

The Rivian R1T. "You'll see us pulling people out of Land Rovers, BMWs, Subarus and Teslas," says Scaringe. Ben Moon

Rivian's vice president of manufacturing, Matt Tall, came from AM General, the maker of Humvees for the military and the Hummer SUVs GM once sold to civilians.

Jeff Hammoud, VP of design, is a veteran of Fiat Chrysler's Jeep.

In an interview before the Amazon announcement, Scaringe declined to comment on that deal, or on any discussions with GM.

He did say Rivian's backers, which include Japan's Sumitomo and Britain's Standard Chartered, are committed.

"We will bring on additional partners, but less because of capital reasons and more because of a need to have strategic relationships as we scale towards our broader vision," he said.

If Scaringe is able to land outside investment from several giants of the auto and technology sectors, he'll be making more Musk-like moves.

Tesla sold stakes to Daimler and Toyota and partnered with them on joint electric-vehicle projects to help weather the recession, though both have since parted ways.

China's Tencent Holdings ranks among the Model 3 maker's top shareholders.

Buy-in from Amazon and others will hand Scaringe the cash to help bring Rivian's R1T pickup to market on time next year.

The investment also carries with it the potential for the world's largest online retailer to eventually become a customer.

Amazon has been building out a fleet of vehicles bearing its brand to handle deliveries for its wildly popular Prime service.

A car buff since his youth, Scaringe grew up on Florida's Space Coast in Melbourne, near Cape Canaveral.

Like his father, he has a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering. He rebuilt a 1957 Porsche Speedster in his youth and dreamed of starting a car company.

While earning his master's and doctorate from MIT, where he was a member of the Sloan Automotive Laboratory's research team, Scaringe had an environmental awakening.

According to official company lore, he spent his free time hiking, carried around his own fork and spoon, dried his laundry on clotheslines strung around his apartment and biked to class, even in the winter.

In class, Scaringe was relatively quiet and well liked by his peers, said Wai Cheng, a professor of mechanical engineering who supervised him.

"He's an extremely nice guy, except when you play basketball with him," Cheng said of how other students described Scaringe.

"He's not an aggressive guy, but he's very competitive."

Scaringe went through several names for the company after founding it in 2009.

It was called Mainstream Motors on an interim basis and received seed capital from Florida-based Mainstream Engineering, a company his father owned.

It briefly went by Avera Motors until South Korea's Hyundai complained this sounded too much like its Azera sedan.

Scaringe settled on Rivian in 2011.

Back when its headquarters was near Cape Canaveral, Rivian got an early leg up from $US3.5 million in state funding.

That included financing from Florida's aerospace economic development organisation, which invested about $US1.5 million in return for stock warrants that it has yet to exercise.

"Obviously, we would have liked them to have built a giant car factory on the Space Coast, but ultimately we expect them to develop technology" that will prove useful to the space program, said Dale Ketcham, a spokesman for Space Florida.

At a briefing for journalists in November, Scaringe said Rivian was looking to do for autos what Patagonia has done for outdoor clothing, aiming for an upscale but utility-focused consumer.

His goal is to make a pickup and SUV that are premium and give buyers a spirit of adventure, but with clean emissions and great technology, including over-the-air updates.

If he delivers, Musk's success suggests Scaringe has a chance to be greeted with broad appeal.

"Tesla did an outstanding job," Scaringe said.

"They pulled customers out of luxury cars and even the Toyota Prius.

"You'll see us pulling people out of Land Rovers, BMWs, Subarus and Teslas."

- with Chester Dawson and Gabrielle Coppola

 

Zilingo's path to becoming a fashion platform with a valuation approaching $US1 billion ($1.4 billion) began in December 2014 when Ankiti Bose, then an analyst at Sequoia India, chatted with a neighbour at a house party in the Indian tech capital Bengaluru.

 

Bose, then 23, and Dhruv Kapoor, a 24-year-old software engineer at gaming studio Kiwi, quickly realised they had complementary skills and similar ambitions to build their own startup.

Four months later they had quit their jobs, and each had put in their $US30,000 in savings to found Zilingo, an online platform that helps merchants in south-east Asia to build up their businesses.

On Tuesday, the Singapore-based company said it raised $US226 million from investors including Sequoia Capital and Temasek Holdings Pte. The latest financing valued Zilingo at $US970 million, according to people familiar with the matter, who asked not to be named because the information is private. That makes 27-year-old Bose among the youngest female chief executives to lead a startup of this size in Asia.

Female founders remain rare in the global startup world. Of the 239 venture capital-backed startups around the world worth at least $US1 billion, only 23 have a female founder, according to data from Pitchbook in May last year.

"We were a bunch of twenty-somethings with nothing except this dream and we decided to chase it," Bose said.

Bose is now part of a group of founders in south-east Asia who are capitalising on the region's rapid adoption of smartphones and rising incomes. Online shopping in the region reached $US23 billion in 2018, according to a report by Google and Temasek. It's expected to exceed $US100 billion by 2025.

Zilingo posted revenue of $S1.8 million ($1.9 million) in the year ending March 31, 2017, up from about $S434,000 since its inception though March 2016, according to the company's most recent filing with Singapore regulators. Revenue grew 12 times in the year ending March 2018 and fourfold in the April to January period, according to the company. Kapoor holds the title of chief technology officer.

The company started off by helping small merchants sell to consumers, and has since expanded into new areas. As the founders dealt with thousands of small sellers, they realised that many lacked access to technology, capital and economies of scale.

So they expanded, developing software and other tools to allow vendors to access factories from Bangladesh to Vietnam and also help with cross-border shipping and inventory management. Since 2018, Zilingo has also worked with financial technology firms to provide working capital to small sellers so they can buy raw materials to produce goods.

Listings are provided for free, with the company charging a commission of between 10 per cent and 20 per cent on orders.

Some of Bose's early inspiration came from a visit to Bangkok's popular Chatuchak market, which features more than 15,000 booths selling goods from across Thailand. She realised the sellers didn't have sufficient opportunities to expand.

Since setting up its first presence in Thailand and Cambodia in 2015, the company has grown to have offices in eight countries with 400 employees. It operates fashion e-commerce sites in Indonesia, Thailand and the Philippines and is preparing to launch in Australia soon.

While Bose has figured out a way to differentiate Zilingo, her challenge is to now manage the company's "hyper-growth" by recruiting the right leadership team and maintaining the right culture, said Shailendra Singh, managing director of Sequoia Capital (India) Singapore.

Raised in India, Bose was exposed to different cultures and languages as a child because her father's job as an engineer at a state-owned oil company caused the family to constantly move.

Her mother gave up her career as a university lecturer and devoted her time to teaching her only child at home. Bose excelled as a student, studied maths and economics, and eventually landed a coveted job with consultancy McKinsey & Co in India, where she covered India's burgeoning technology, media and telecom sector.

She took the calculated plunge to set up Zilingo, she says, after gaining expertise evaluating major startups in south-east Asia at Sequoia India's venture capital business. As she did that, she saw a huge opportunity to build a business herself.

"I kept raising my hand and said, 'Teach me everything,' " Bose said of her pre-startup years.

"I busted my ass, working 18 hours a day because it was so much fun."

Whole Foods is raising prices again, bowing to pressure from some consumer product makers to cover rising packaging, ingredient and transportation costs on hundreds of products.

Internal communications reviewed by The Wall Street Journal show the natural grocer raised prices from US10c to several dollars as suppliers boosted their prices in the face of growing costs. Retailers across the spectrum are starting to pass on similar price increases in response to the growing signs of inflation. Amazon.com cut prices after acquiring Whole Foods in 2017 to try to counter the grocer’s high-cost reputation. But even the e-commerce giant has limits as to price increases pushed by suppliers.

Whole Foods increased prices this month on dozens of items, from Dr Bronner’s soaps to Haagen-Dazs ice cream, according to an email viewed by the Journal. A separate company email in December listed 550 additional price increases on products including crackers, olives and biscuits.

Whole Foods said in the December email that suppliers were charging more for those products due to inflation. The separate price increases this month followed the expiration of annual contracts to sell about 700 goods at low prices, Whole Foods said. Those contracts won’t be renewed, the chain said, and the increases add up to hundreds of thousands of dollars a week in additional revenue.

Several consumer goods companies, including Procter & Gamble and Clorox, have recently raised prices or pledged to do so, to offset the higher costs of raw materials and boost profits. Nearly half of 52 consumer goods manufacturers surveyed recently by consulting firm Acosta raised prices last year.

Mondelez International and Hershey last month said they would raise prices this year. Price increases have now started to spill into natural brands, some of which source expensive ingredients with limited supplies.

The average price increase at Whole Foods was US66c, according to the list.

Supermarkets have resisted passing along the price increases amid intensifying competition in their industry. Some are starting to relent. California-based Smart & Final Stores, a warehouse-style grocer, has received requests from hundreds of suppliers to raise prices and expects costs to continue to rise this year.

Some supermarkets are also agreeing to stock new brands and sizes that bring food makers more profits. Others, such as Kroger, are stocking more store-brands to try to help keep prices low overall.

At Whole Foods, a basket of 40 select items purchased from their stores cost $US191 last month, according to the Telsey Advisory Group, up more than 3 per cent from what the same basket of goods cost late last year.

A Whole Foods spokeswoman said some of the grocer’s suppliers had raised prices due to higher material, labour and freight costs. Whole Foods had passed on some of those increased costs and absorbed the rest, she said.