KFC, the beloved American brand, generates 85% of its revenue from outside the US. One third of it comes from China.
Business & Brands
Blackjack and poker might be the quintessential casino games, but they don’t drive the bottom line. 70% of Las Vegas gambling revenue is from slot machines, which brought in $10.5B last year (for comparison, the entire US box office in 2024 was $8.5B).
Lego’s research revealed that its toys weren’t just appealing to curious children, but adults who wanted to relive their childhoods. A series of 18+ product innovations have since become bestsellers; including the 2,048-piece ‘Friends apartments’ (based on the sitcom), a 11,695-piece ‘World Map’, and the Mos Eisley Cantina from Star Wars. In fact adults now account for 25% of sales in the wider toy industry, according to the NPD group.
In the 1930s, English toymaker Hilary Fisher Page was selling a system of ‘self-locking building bricks’ called Kiddicraft. It then became the main inspiration for Lego, as the company will readily admit.
Lidl owner Schwarz Group has a standalone unit that offers cloud computing to corporate customers. It generated €1.9bn in annual sales in 2023, and its clients include Germany’s biggest software group SAP and the country’s most successful football club Bayern Munich.
When electric bikes run out of charge their batteries need to be replaced. Lime cut their battery costs in half by moving from fixed batteries to swappable batteries, so employees could charge bikes there and then, rather than having to drive them back to the warehouse to charge overnight.
Hard Numbers, a PR company, claims that bosses of unicorns – start-ups worth $1 billion – who post regularly on LinkedIn and have lots of followers are more successful at raising money. But does one really lead to another? Or is the more likely case that successful business owners end up attracting lots of followers?
Louis Vuitton is one of few brands that never discounts products. “Items advertised as discounted on the Web are invariably fake,” it states online. This is a smart decision for the luxury brand, which realises that doing so retains the value of the products while sending the confident message that the original price is exactly as it should be.
Gone are the days when luxury bags flaunt a giant logo. The Row is one of the trendsetting brands that, according to the founders, shows how something made “beautifully, in great fabric, with good fit, can sell without a logo or a name on it.”
Rolls Royce reported a £5.4 billion loss in the first half of 2020. Like many luxury car brands, the pandemic had wiped out demand – but it proved to be temporary. In 2023 it delivered more cars than any other year in its history, and its share price was up by 150% compared to before the pandemic.
The world’s largest hotel corporation owns very few hotels. Instead, Marriott makes money by selling its brand to franchisees, who then set up Marriot branded hotels and pay an annual fee in return.
McDonald’s is essentially a real estate company, making billions in rent from franchised restaurants.
The need for speed led the McDonald brothers to turn to Henry Ford and the world of cars. If Ford could use a specialised system to build a car in two hours, the McDonald brothers could use it to make a burger in less than a minute. They created a new dispenser that squirted the same amount of ketchup every time, and they replaced the silverware with paper wrappings to remove the need for a big dishwasher. The resulting ‘speedee system’ became the basis for modern day fast food as we know it.
Monopoly released a new ‘simplified’ version of the game, where a mobile app handles all transactions and removes the need for a banker or physical money. Sure, players will find it easier to pay, and harder to cheat, but in the words of one journalist: “it is nowhere near as tantalising as the prospect of flaunting piles of pink and orange notes in a delicious victory over your competitive mother.” Plus, as any regular player will know, a bit of fraud is part of the fun.
Every penny counts for supermarkets. So Morrisons has recently increased the temperature of its freezers from -18°C to -15°C, after a previous trial suggested the move would save 10% on energy costs.