How did my 2020 predictions do?

88/120 or 73% this year. A great result for a COVID year.

Global economy

Although Brexit is looking less hard, American-Chinese trade war is wading,... structural issues are not solved. Italian banks are in danger. Brexit will run into difficult negotiating times. But most importantly the economical bubble bursts. Not like 2008 but more like the 2000 dotcom bubble bursted. The cheap and abundant VC funding era comes to an end. WeWorks becomes the Pets.com of this decade. Corporate debt is in oversupply and much does not find a buyer when it gets massively downgraded to junk. Chinese‘s economy disacceleration provokes social unrest in several major cities. Inflation will return.

Comments: 8/10. A hard Brexit was only avoided in the last minute via a lot of extra negotiations. Italy was hit hard by Covid and is in economical trouble. Unicorns that were loss making without any profit in sight, got into trouble with down rounds, debt write offs and bankruptcies. Corporate debt crash has not happened but due to Covid some corporate debt lost a lot of its value, e.g. high street. Hong Kong got strong social unrest.

Financial Services

Brexit, FinTech disruption and Financial Platforms make for a perfect storm. Disruption spreads from current accounts to investment, insurance, pensions,... Consumers and small enterprises are the main focus. B2B and Institutional are still protected from disruption, for now.

Comments: 7/10. Starling making a profit with Revolut right behind it while many of the major retail banks have substantial profit drops and large workforce restructuring. The Lemonade IPO is a great example of insurance disruption. Decentralised Finance grew more than 1500% in capital under management from June to December. Lots of investment, payment, and other disruptions are on the horizon.

Automobile

Tesla will start delivery of the model Y in late spring, early summer. Tesla will be the number one auto seller in 2020. 2020 will not yet be the year for Tesla robot taxis. Several second tier brands will start consolidating. Google will become “the saviour” in the fight to introduce autonomous driving capabilities into a long list of car manufacturers. However this will be a Trojan Horse which in five years time will enable Google to control a large share of the robot taxi market.

Comments: 7/10. Tesla is now the world’s most valuable car company with a big margin. Tesla started delivery of the model Y in the first half of the year. Tesla started the beta of full auto-pilot with large scale roll-out planned for early 2021. Several existing car brands are consolidating their electric vehicles and self driving efforts. Some even pulled out of self-driving and directly went to Google. Tesla is offering to license their EV (drive train and batteries) and auto-pilot technologies.

Media

?Everybody and their dog will be advertising their Netflix copy. This will result in too much money for new content creation for too few actors and producers. Content prices will balloon. However there is a big difference between writing a multi million cheque to buy blockbuster series and movies and getting many millions to buy a subscription. Netflix will short term have to spend a bit more on content but most rivals will close their doors in the next three years with at least one doing so in 2020 which will allow content to be bought on the cheap. Disney is likely to be successful as the kids add-on streaming service, in addition to Netflix. Same will happen for news, sports and specialty content but neither Apple, Hulu, Amazon,... will dethrone Netflix.

Comments: 8/10. Covid made streaming the new normal. Apple went with cheque book in hand to buy content. Disney is doing great. Netflix is still the market leader with no close competitor in sight.

Telecom

5G deployments will see delays and rising costs because Huawei can not be used in several countries. Facebook will start offering open source base stations and telecom solutions designs for no name producers to create 5G solutions at a fraction of the price the three proprietary vendors were offering them. The next iPhone will support 5G but given that Apple needs new revenues urgently, it will start launching its own global telecom virtual operator. Apple will run into trouble with its Apple Tax on mobile apps. The European Union will fine Apple a large fine because of anti-monopolistic behaviour. SpaceX will start delivering basic services based on Starlink which will be successful in rural America.

Comments: 6/10. 5G deployments started and without Huawei costs have gone up. Facebook’s TIP has not yet delivered large scale cost reductions however. 5G iPhone was launched but not Apple operator. Apple ran into trouble with the Apple tax and is being investigated by the EU. SpaceX started offering commercially Starlink.

Space

SpaceX will fly first astronauts to the international space station. Given the pressure to launch fast, one of the new space companies will have a serious accident.

Comments: 5/10. SpaceX flew first astronauts. Luckily no major accidents.

High Tech

ARM will be successful in taking double digits sales in the server world. RISC V will be successful in cheap IoT devices. Amazon will come up with a successful new type of IoT device. Amazon will launch industrial 3D printing as a service. Ring will be disruptive in the alarm and security industry because it will make the jump to small businesses. Google will be disruptive with a new voice enabled service. Facebook will get strong Chinese competition. Chinese high tech companies will go global and compete with the tech giants in Europe and the US. Quantum computing will be the big hype of 2020. The next big thing is when Artificial intelligence meets security and cloud operations to create a NoOps model in which humans are no longer needed. Lots of talk but no production solutions at scale yet.

Comments: 8/10. ARM in both server and PC has seen an explosion in revenue. Especially Amazon and other cloud providers are now offering cheap ARM based servers. Apple’s ARM MacBook is very successful. Ring is becoming strong in security. Amazon did not launch a new super successful IoT device. Lots of sales of next versions of Ring, Echo,... TikTok is in the top 5 most downloaded mobile apps, dethroning Facebook for the first time. Huawei is building HarmonyOS to compete with Apple and a Google. Quantum computing was a big hype. Lots of DevSecOps now use AI to detect unseen threats but NoOps or AutoOps is still in the making and not quite available.

Health

The Netflix of Medicines will offer all you can eat generic medicines in several countries which will for the first time see national medicine bills go down. To avoid price wars, existing medical giants will move to use DNA based techniques to create custom medicines as the next big market.

Comments: 5/10. Due to Covid the Health industry had a big boom. Amazon is becoming a disruptive online pharmacy.

Industrial

Blockchain will be successful in logistics. First robotic factories will start producing products based on a mobile app based scanner. Indoor LIDAR will make autonomous robots improve enormously.

Comments: 6/10. Blockchain is starting to revolutionise logistics. Although many 3D scanner apps are available, the push to be delivered option is not yet available. Indoor LIDAR for robotics have become cheap.

Aviation

Electric based aviation will see an enormous boost thanks to a disruptive battery improvement.

Comments: 10/10. First battery operated planes took off in 2020.

Energy

Oil price will fall substantially due to electric vehicles sales, shale gas oversupply, economic deceleration and substantial improvements in the price of green energy.

Comments: 9/10. COVID was also a major factor.

New Industries

A new token based / smart contract industry will be successfully created to enable transactions that used to take weeks and lots of people to be done in seconds. drag and drop smart contracts built by non-programmers will become important enablers.

Tokenisation will disrupt large assets trading and green investments.

Startups will start raising substantial money based on security token offerings (STOs) with “traditional investors into VCs” moving into this new space. STOs will enable automated trading of early startup stock bringing new levels of liquidity.

Comments: 9/10. DeFi went from 1B to 15B assets under management from June to December. Decentralised exchanges are a major part of this disruption. Lots of new tokens have come to raise millions in weeks if not hours.No code is the absolute buzzword of 2020 whereby “citizen developers” can create their own applications without coding. The first no code smart contracts platforms are emerging, e.g. Atra.