Despite pandemic, forecasts predict US online holiday sales increase of 20%-30% or more

Strong e-commerce sales are predicted to help lift overall holiday retail spending in the U.S., according to forecasts released today by the National Retail Federation (NRF) and eMarketer. Both firms expect to see overall retail sales growth during November and December, though the market may be impacted by slowing brick-and-mortar sales.

Of the two, NRF had the more optimistic forecast. It estimates U.S. holiday sales during November and December will increase between 3.6% and 5.2% year-over-year, for a total between $755.3 billion and $766.7 billion. That’s compared with a 4% increase in 2019 to $729.1 billion, and an average of a 3.5% increase over the past five years.

Image Credits: NRF

Growth will come from online and other non-store sales, which are included in the total, which will increase between 20% and 30% to reach between $202.5 billion and $218.4 billion. That’s up from $168.7 billion last year.

NRF’s takeaway is that consumers are willing to spend — perhaps because of the challenging year that 2020 has been, rather than despite it.

“After all they’ve been through, we think there’s going to be a psychological factor that they owe it to themselves and their families to have a better-than-normal holiday,” noted NRF Chief Economist Jack Kleinhenz. “There are risks to the economy if the virus continues to spread, but as long as consumers remain confident and upbeat, they will spend for the holiday season,” he added.

The firm also noted Americans may have reduced their spending in other categories, like personal services, travel and entertainment due to the pandemic, which could increase the money they have for retail spending.

EMarketer, on the other hand, paints a less rosy picture when it comes to overall sales.

The firm predicts that total holiday season retail sales will see the lowest growth rate at just 0.9% year-over-year. This growth will come from the e-commerce sector, which will see its highest growth rate — 35.8% — since the firm began tracking retail sales in 2008. Brick-and-mortar sales, on the other hand, will decline 4.7%.

The discrepancy between these two firms’ estimates have to do with how they calculate “retail sales.”

EMarketer’s estimates include auto and gasoline sales, but exclude restaurants, travel and event sales. NRF’s figures, on the other hand, exclude auto, gasoline and restaurants.

However, both agree on an e-commerce surge. NRF notes online sales were already up 36.7% year-over-year in the third quarter — in part, due to early holiday shopping. This year, some 42% of consumers had started shopping earlier than usual, it recently found. Plus, retail sales were up 10.6% in October 2020 versus October 2019, in aggregate, its forecast noted.

But whether it’s 20% to 30% growth or 35.8%, depending on the firm, it’s clear e-commerce is saving the day here.

NRF also expects seasonal hiring to be in line with recent years, as retailers hire between 475,000 and 575,000 seasonal workers compared with 562,000 in 2019. Some of that hiring may have already taken place in October, due to early shopping, it said.

Though Black Friday may not see the same levels of in-person shopping as in years past, brick-and-mortar retailers have made it easier to shop digitally, then either have items shipped home, picked up in-store, or even curbside. Outside of Amazon, Walmart and Target have particularly benefited from investments in e-commerce, as both retailers easily beat Wall St. expectations in their latest earnings reports, released just ahead of the holiday quarter.

Online, however, Cyber Monday will continue to rule, however, eMarketer says.

Image Credits: eMarketer

Of the five big online shopping days in 2020, eMarketer says Cyber Monday will again beat out Black Friday in terms of overall e-commerce sales, at $12.89 billion compared with Black Friday’s $10.20 billion. But Thanksgiving Day will see the most year-over-year growth in e-commerce sales, at 49.5%, followed by Black Friday, Small Business Saturday, Cyber Sunday and Cyber Monday.

Image Credits: eMarketer

In a mobile forecast, analytics firm App Annie predicted Americans would spend over 110 million hours in shopping apps on Android devices during the two-week period consisting of Black Friday and Cyber Monday weeks. It noted the pandemic had already accelerated mobile device usage to 4 hours, 20 minutes per day, and Americans spent over 61 million hours shopping during the week of Prime Day.

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7 things we just learned about Sequoia’s European expansion plans

Sequoia Capital, the renowned Silicon Valley venture capital firm that has backed companies like Apple, Google, Dropbox, Airbnb and Stripe, recently disclosed that it had opened its first office in Europe. To staff up, it hired partner Luciana Lixandru away from rival Accel Partners.

Even without an official European presence, Sequoia has quietly operated in the region for more than a decade, first investing in Klarna in 2010. Other Europe-founded companies in its portfolio include Baaima, CEGX, Charlotte Tilbury, Dashlane, Evervault, FON Wireless, Front, Graphcore, Mapillary, Metaswitch Networks, n8n, Remote, Skyscanner, Songkick, Tessian, Tourlane, UiPath, Unity and 6Winderkinder (Wunderlist).

Yet, it is only now that the VC firm is putting people on the ground here in Europe, starting with an office in London that has a remit to invest across the continent.

Working alongside Lixandru is a more junior investor, George Robson, who joined from Revolut. Most recently, Sequoia recruited Zoe Jervier Hewitt from EQT as head of talent in Europe. And finally, Matt Miller, a Sequoia U.S. veteran, is also part of the European efforts and plans to relocate next year, while I also understand that Sequoia’s Doug Leone will be spending a lot of his time in Europe.

Last week at the virtual “Node by Slush” event, I interviewed Lixandru and Miller and teased out some important details about Sequoia’s plans.

1. Sequoia now believes Europe is producing market leaders ahead of Silicon Valley

“There has been this evolution and maturity of the tech ecosystem that has been really meaningful, that has attracted us to want to put down boots on the ground and be more invested in Europe than ever before,” said Sequoia partner Matt Miller.

“One change is in the attitudes of young people. Europe has always been this place where there’s been incredible talent coming out of the computer science programs, across the universities across the continent and the U.K., and these young people previously, were going into careers in investment banking and consulting are bigger conglomerates. And now that those young people are interested in startups and technology careers, that’s fueling a lot of great ideas and a lot of great talent.

“There was a long time this question of, when will there be a $10 billion plus startup, and now there’s multiple of them across the continent. And now the question has really changed: When will there be the next hundred billion dollar startup in Europe, and I think it’s just an evolution over time.

“We find ourselves getting pulled more and more. So when … we want to invest in the best AI semiconductor company in the world, we looked at them in China, Israel and Europe. And the one we wanted to invest in was Graphcore, in Bristol [in the U.K.]. And when we looked … [to] invest in the best process automation company in the world, we looked at automation anywhere in California … and we looked at companies all over the world, and the one we wanted to invest in was UiPath in Romania. And that is increasingly becoming the case.”

“To some extent, success breeds success, too,” said Lixandru. “I think role models are really powerful. And the fact that there have been these category-leading companies created out of Europe, but that are winning on a global scale, like Spotify, Adyen and UiPath … I think that’s really inspirational to the next generation of founders. And I think that has helped a lot.”

2. The firm will make investments out of the same fund as the U.S.

“We work as one partnership across two geographies, and we invest from the same pool of capital across both geographies,” explained Lixandru. “And the rationale behind that is exactly what Matt talked about. We want to be able to partner with category leading companies, and if they start in Paris, or in Stockholm, or in San Francisco, for us, it does not make a difference. We want to partner with them early. And we want to be able to help them on the ground early … whether they start here in Europe or in the U.S.”

Related to this, Sequoia will share carry — the fund’s profits — with partners across the U.S. and Europe, regardless of where partners reside or where the deal was sourced.

“One of the things that I love the most about Sequoia having been here close to nine years now is the way that we operate is very, very team centric, and that everybody is compensated the same amount in a fund, whether or not it is the investment that they lead or the investment that their partner led,” said Miller. “So when we make an investment, we lock arms together as a team, and we work collectively to help that company be successful.”

Miller said portfolio companies in Europe also get to work with Sequoia’s operational supporting partners in the U.S., too. “And the economic model is one that supports that,” he said.

3. Sequoia will continue building out a team on the ground in Europe

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Decrypted: Apple and Facebook’s privacy feud, Twitter hires Mudge, mysterious zero-days

Trump’s election denialism saw him retaliate in a way that isn’t just putting the remainder of his presidency in jeopardy, it’s already putting the next administration in harm’s way.

In a stunning display of retaliation, Trump fired CISA director Chris Krebs last week after declaring that there was “no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes or was in any way compromised,” a direct contradiction to the conspiracy-fueled fever dreams of the president who repeatedly claimed, without evidence, that the election had been hijacked by the Democrats. CISA is left distracted by disarray, with multiple senior leaders leaving their posts — some walked, some were pushed — only for the next likely chief to stumble before he even starts because of concerns with his security clearance.

Until yesterday, Biden’s presidential transition team was stuck in cybersecurity purgatory because the incumbent administration refused to trigger the law that grants the incoming team access to government resources, including cybersecurity protections. That’s left the incoming president exposed to ongoing cyber threats, all while being shut out from classified briefings that describe those threats in detail.

As Biden builds his team, Silicon Valley is also gearing up for a change in government — and temperament. But don’t expect too much of the backlash to change. Much of the antitrust allegations, privacy violations and net neutrality remain hot button issues, and the tech titans resorting to cheap “charm offenses” are likely to face the music under the Biden administration — whether they like it or not.

Here’s more from the week.

---

THE BIG PICTURE

Apple and Facebook spar over privacy — again

Apple and Facebook are back in the ring, fighting over which company is a bigger existential threat to privacy. In a letter to a privacy rights group, Apple said its new anti-tracking feature will launch next year, which will give users the choice of blocking in-app tracking, a move that’s largely expected to cause havoc to the online advertising industry and data brokers.

Given an explicit option between being tracked and not, as the feature will do, most are expected to decline.

Apple’s letter specifically called out Facebook for showing a “disregard for user privacy.” Facebook, which made more than 98% of its global revenue last year from advertising, took its own potshot back at Apple, claiming the iPhone maker was “using their dominant market position to self-preference their own data collection, while making it nearly impossible for their competitors to use the same data.”

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Decrypted: Apple and Facebook’s privacy feud, Twitter hires Mudge, mysterious zero-days

Trump’s election denialism saw him retaliate in a way that isn’t just putting the remainder of his presidency in jeopardy, it’s already putting the next administration in harm’s way.

In a stunning display of retaliation, Trump fired CISA director Chris Krebs last week after declaring that there was “no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes or was in any way compromised,” a direct contradiction to the conspiracy-fueled fever dreams of the president who repeatedly claimed, without evidence, that the election had been hijacked by the Democrats. CISA is left distracted by disarray, with multiple senior leaders leaving their posts — some walked, some were pushed — only for the next likely chief to stumble before he even starts because of concerns with his security clearance.

Until yesterday, Biden’s presidential transition team was stuck in cybersecurity purgatory because the incumbent administration refused to trigger the law that grants the incoming team access to government resources, including cybersecurity protections. That’s left the incoming president exposed to ongoing cyber threats, all while being shut out from classified briefings that describe those threats in detail.

As Biden builds his team, Silicon Valley is also gearing up for a change in government — and temperament. But don’t expect too much of the backlash to change. Much of the antitrust allegations, privacy violations and net neutrality remain hot button issues, and the tech titans resorting to cheap “charm offenses” are likely to face the music under the Biden administration — whether they like it or not.

Here’s more from the week.

---

THE BIG PICTURE

Apple and Facebook spar over privacy — again

Apple and Facebook are back in the ring, fighting over which company is a bigger existential threat to privacy. In a letter to a privacy rights group, Apple said its new anti-tracking feature will launch next year, which will give users the choice of blocking in-app tracking, a move that’s largely expected to cause havoc to the online advertising industry and data brokers.

Given an explicit option between being tracked and not, as the feature will do, most are expected to decline.

Apple’s letter specifically called out Facebook for showing a “disregard for user privacy.” Facebook, which made more than 98% of its global revenue last year from advertising, took its own potshot back at Apple, claiming the iPhone maker was “using their dominant market position to self-preference their own data collection, while making it nearly impossible for their competitors to use the same data.”

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With new cash and a former Apple exec now at the helm, Connect Homes is ready to reconstruct homebuilding

Greg Leung had worked at Apple for years and was coming off a stint at the smart lock company Otto when he got the call to interview with Connect Homes.

The pitch — building a starter home for a much lower cost than other prefabricated houses on the market, and one that could be dropped in to locations in the urban core of most cities — was too good to pass up.

“Basically, it’s a beautiful product, but done in a way that disrupts and transforms the way homes are built,” said Leung.

The homes come in 15 standardized configurations and can scale from 460 square foot up to 3,200 square feet. What differentiates the company from its competitors, says Leung, is the speed with which Connect Homes can build a house, putting up a full house in six days.

Not only that, but the homes are able to use standard shipping networks and rail transit to bring their homes anywhere in the country. “We build modules the size of a shipping container, so we can connect to the regular intermodal shipping network,” Leung said.

Interior view of a Connect Homes pre-fabricated home. Image Credit: Connect Homes

The company’s smaller homes run around $174,000 all-in, while a 3,200-square-foot home costs around $825,000. That’s about half of the cost for a custom home today, Leung said.

“What we’re doing is providing a beautiful, modern, product for half the price of a traditional custom homebuilder,” he said.

Currently, Leung said, there are three types of new construction getting built — new tract homes, multi-family housing units and high rises. But, there’s an opportunity to infill housing. “Seventy percent of the Bay Area and LA were built in the 70s. That means there are millions of homes that are too small and out of date and energy inefficient,” Leung said. “It costs $1 million to $1.5 million to build a home… No one is addressing the urban infill market except for us.”

And Leung’s interest extended beyond the 88 projects that the company has completed for new homeowners. From its Los Angeles headquarters with a factory in San Bernardino, California, the company is also looking to change how municipalities and governments think about temporary shelters and living spaces for the unhoused.

Founded by Jared Levy and Gordon Stoddard, two architects who worked in the pre-fabricated building division of the firm Marmol Radziner, Connect Homes had raised $27 million to build out a vision of pre-fab future.

That capital includes a recent $5 million round that served to reboot the company and refocus it around its manufacturing technology that can create deployable shelters alongside its housing work. That was another draw for Leung, whose experience in Northern California made him acutely aware of the housing problem the nation faces.

The single module shelter that the company has developed can be transported and put on site in one day. Adding a generator to the 40 foot by eight foot module the company is building means that the shelter has the flexibility of a trailer, but can be ready for habitation in 24 hours.

“We designed this to sell to municipalities and third-party service providers to house people,” Leung said. 

Customers for the new product include the Thatcher School in Ojai and a project in Mountain View, California done in partnership with Life Moves.

Prices for the shelters range between $20,000 and $30,000 per-bed, or $80,000 per module. Those prices compare incredibly favorably to the $500,000 to $1 million communities pay for a bed in permanent supportive housing, said Leung.

Still, the company’s fancy replacements for tent cities don’t do anything to address the underlying housing crisis that plagues cities across the country.

“We’re trying to be the opposite of bespoke housing that we see as part of the problem. The shelters was a reaction to an urgent need. We had the ability to do something innovative to solve the problem,” said Leung. “I don’t see the amazing talent and innovation being applied to this problem. And it’s affecting the well-being and health of millions and millions of people… This is something that will last for possibly lifetimes.”

View of a Connect Homes house being installed. Image Credit: Connect Homes

The attempt to create a new fable for the reconstruction of the building industry is what drew Brick & Mortar Ventures back to the table to recapitalize the company with the new $5 million in cash the company recently secured, according to Darren Bechtel, the founder and managing director of the firm.

A scion of the Bechtel engineering and construction family, Bechtel has a deep knowledge of the industry and sees Connect Homes as one of the best bets to disrupt traditional construction.

“You cannot construct today cheaper than existing assets,” Bechtel said. But, the opportunity to rethink construction as manufacturing is creating an environment that can drive down costs more effectively, he said.

“It’s been a primitive form of manufacturing for some time,” Bechtel said of the housing industry. “The difference from traditional manufacturing and even automobiles, is that when you get to the scale of a house, you exceed the ability to transport that product efficiently from the manufacturing site to the end delivery site.”

That’s the key problem that Bechtel saw Connect Homes solving. “You have to standardize around intermodal shipping or you have to get permits. You are limited on which roads you use,” he said. “If you’re doing a true kit of parts, you’re requiring craft workers to do the finished work on site.”

Connect Homes, said Bechtel, is taking a different approach from the homebuilders that are looking to be mostly vertically integrated. He said Connect Homes was taking a more Apple-like approach where they oversee the product lifecycle and the customer experience. “That’s how you reach global scale and create the VW and Audi of housing,” he said. “A house is the most expensive purchase. The fact that this is still a bespoke product in the vast majority of scenarios doesn’t make sense.”

Bechtel also drew a distinction between the companies that are primarily targeting the accessory dwelling unit market in California and Connect Homes, which has broader aspirations.

“A lot of people who are buying and selling ADUs are getting an extra guest house. They want more space for themselves,” he said. “At a much larger scale if you can take existing housing stocks that are in medium or high density areas that are old properties with larger footprints and you can create two or three housing units in the same spot with new inventory, you’re drastically improving both the quality and the quantity of housing stock.”

That’s the ultimate goal for Connect Homes, Bechtel said. And it’s going to be returning to market just as that market could be poised to rebound, said Bechtel.

“We believe you’re going to see a massive rebound in the need for housing,” said Bechtel. “The single family housing market will return.” And when it does, Connect Homes will be working on scaling up to meet the new demand.

Construction tech startups are poised to shake up a $1.3-trillion-dollar industry

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After Apple’s M1 launch, Intel announces its own white-label laptop

Its long fruitful relationship with Apple may be sunsetting soon, but Intel’s still got a fairly massive footprint in the PC market. There’s never a good time to get complacent, though (a lesson the company learned the hard way on the mobile front).

This week the chip giant is debuting its own laptop, the NUC M15. More properly, the NUC M15 Laptop Kit; the device is actually a white-label system. It’s essentially a reference design so smaller device makers don’t have to commit to the long and expensive process of building a system from scratch.

It is, as The Verge notes, not the first time the company has created this sort of reference design. It recently created a gaming system to similar ends. But much like the recent MacBooks, the system is designed to offer high performance in a package designed more for productivity.

There are two configurations for the system, featuring either a Core i7 chip coupled with 16GB of RAM or a Core i5 with 8GB of RAM. That will, obviously, be complemented by Windows 10, which will take advantage of the 15.6-inch touchscreen.

Pricing and timing and all of that good stuff will likely depend on which vendors take the system across the finish line.

MacBook Air M1 review: The right Apple Silicon Mac for most

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Gillmor Gang: Apple Tacks

When the music’s over, turn out the lights. Back in the day, The Doors were one of a number of 60s rock groups to surface around the intersection of blues, R&B, and a cultural shift that challenged our notions of who was in charge. The Doors were a four-piece that sounded like something bigger. The keyboard player, Ray Manzarek, created that sleight of hand by collapsing bass, drums, guitar, keyboard, and vocal to drums, guitar, vocal, and bass on his left hand and melody on his right.

In the studio, they often augmented the sound with a traditional bass sideman, but the overall feel of the left hand driving the feel and the right the upper notes produced a unique sound and hybrid of musical styles. They were not my favorite, but the night I caught them at a New York club called Electric Circus, I lurked stunned behind Manzarek as he performed this magic trick cum laude into the night. Years later, I remember every note. It feels like I cheated the bounds of the universe.

Since the election, I’ve been hoping for a sense of completion, of triumph over the bounds of the terror of these times. Surely, a big part of it is the pandemic, which doesn’t care how close it was in Georgia or when or if Trump flies off to Florida for the holidays. But news of a second robust vaccine trial suggests the tough times, though not over by any means, may be in sight of an end or at least some version of a plan to get there.

Not so much for Trump and his fearful enablers. There’s much to look forward to: Inauguration Day, or as I like to call it, Eviction Day. A bailout of the 20 million unemployed that keeps them in their homes and on a pathway to economic recovery. A rational approach to the science of the virus and how to slow it while we figure out how to distribute the vaccines. A majority government for a change.

Instead, every last step will be fought tooth and nail. The early breath of fresh air is still lingering, but there’s no doubt this will be for every inch of the way. Come to think of it, did we really expect anything different? No, we expected the worst, and we got it. But this is not about the politics for me. It’s about finding a place to breathe, to invest in a future we can accept, to relearn how to be kind to ourselves in setting our expectations.

I’ve always held a fascination for technology for just that reason — to experience the combined shouts of innovation and inspiration that lead to breakthroughs in what’s possible. Even in the darkest depths of this crisis, the vaccine trials offer a glimpse at the leading edge of new approaches that will span not just the current virus but advances in efforts to battle cancer and other more traditional enemies. In politics, some of the citizen-based fundraising efforts of Bernie Sanders and media innovations like the Lincoln Project suggest ways of countering the negative effects of social networks and misinformation attacks.

In the more conventional reaches of tech, Apple’s M1 transition from Intel to Apple Silicon chips is unmistakably thrilling. Seeing the wave of computing acceleration spurred by the iPhone and iPad merging with the Mac on the desktop is so inspiring. For the first time, I’m delaying the new iPhone because I lust for the new Silicon version of the MacBook Air. Why? Because of what it doesn’t have, a fan. It’s like the taxi scene in Star Wars, you know the one where they’re not the droids you’re looking for. Then: no wheels.

Now: it’s not about the fact that you can run iOS apps on the Mac. It’s that you can write apps that take advantage of the whole platform, not just mobile but not Mac, or Web but not etc. The trade offs between the two platforms are evaporating. Notifications may be useless still on the desktop; that will rapidly change as app makers get used to the system-wide features spread across the merged platform. Video editing can move seamlessly to and from iPad (LumaTouch) and back to the Mac (X86 emulation mode), creating a production ecosystem and rendering farm for the new streaming renaissance. Work from home goes portable, plug and play as you travel and collaborate.

This will happen because Apple Silicon is such a game changer that it will be impossible to disrupt. Instant on, silent computing, virtual memory so invisible that you can swap huge loads in and out of memory, all kinds of attention to how people really use computers in this mobile era. The iPhone and iPad changed the way we thought about things. Now the Mac thinks that way too.

The only way I can justify the upgrade to the latest iPhone is by reupping to the Apple monthly payment contract at the end of the first of two years. So, Apple, how about you put the M1 MacBook Air on that plan, That way, as the ecosystem expands across the new modular software/hardware economy of speed, silence, and computing that just works, I can upgrade every release to the latest and greatest. The Apple Tax never had it so good.

__________________

The Gillmor Gang — Frank Radice, Michael Markman, Keith Teare, Denis Pombriant, Brent Leary, and Steve Gillmor. Recorded live Friday, November 13, 2020.

Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor

@fradice, @mickeleh, @denispombriant, @kteare, @brentleary, @stevegillmor, @gillmorgang

For more, subscribe to the Gillmor Gang Newsletter and join the backchannel here on Telegram.

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