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Ask HN: Industries with low productivity growth that aren't highly regulated?

5 pointsby Pandabobover 5 years ago
The one that comes to mind is the construction industry. In my experience it&#x27;s very fragmented, uses subcontractors inefficiently and has a low penetration of software use.<p>What others come to mind?

2 comments

adventuredover 5 years ago
The self-storage industry.<p>Hyper fragmented. 10% of the industry is owned by the industry giants (like Public Storage, which is a $39 billion publicly traded REIT), leaving 90% fragmented to small owners &#x2F; independent businesses.<p>Very low productivity growth, very low innovation, poor management software options in the segment.<p>Someone could make a billion dollars just through consolidation of a tiny fraction of that mess, backed with better software and process.<p>Public Storage only has 5,600 employees and via their REIT structure spits off $1.4 billion in operating income every year.<p>The entire industry&#x27;s value, going by what Public Storage is able to manage, is probably $1.2 to $1.5 trillion. And it&#x27;s not going anywhere in the coming ~30 years, people are not going to suddenly stop storing their junk. It&#x27;ll take an operator a lifetime to roll-up, consolidate even 1%-3% of the industry.
rijojaover 5 years ago
Really interesting question! Thank you for asking! That being said, is productivity really not growing in the construction industry? Also what sources do you have on low utilization of software? I suppose computer science have a very high saturation of competence on task management systems. Still keeping track of materials and so forth must be digitized since a long time along with the blueprints for the buildings and so forth?<p>With computer usage being so widespread isn&#x27;t it quite unlikely that at no point someone would have interest in computers and any particular industry that tried to combine their knowledge from both fields.<p>So in short, is there really any low hanging fruit left? Also could you elaborate on why you say that the construction industry is not using software efficiently.
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