Before COVID, everyone took the global supply chain for granted. If you wanted something, like a new car, you just went out and bought it. You rarely if ever encountered shortages of anything. And prices were cheap. We enjoyed a number of deflationary decades, whereby inexpensive labor in Asian countries produced goods for less and less … and the American consumer was among the benefactors of that trend. But the global pandemic turned all that on its head.
With one move, Apple Inc. (Nasdaq: AAPL) created a sea change in the way social media platforms make money. I’m talking about Apple’s privacy features, which let iPhone users opt out of data collection by digital advertising agencies. The move came in April 2021 … though it took some time for investors to fully understand its impact on social media’s once profitable, ad-driven business model. And it’ll take even longer for the largest and least-nimble companies to thrive with the new model.
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