Business
来源于《商业》版块
Big Tech and antitrust
大型科技公司与反垄断
How to dismantle a monopoly
如何打破垄断
Would it be possible to carve up Big Tech? If so, would it ever happen?
有可能瓜分大型科技公司吗？如果是这样，它会发生吗？
“Father lennon, have you some money? Buy Standard Oil.” That’s what John D. Rockefeller is said to have told his golf partner, a priest, when he heard the news in 1911 that the Supreme Court had ruled his oil company was to be broken up into 34 smaller firms. It was good advice. Within a few years the value of those firms rose threefold. The net worth of Rockefeller, who owned more than 25% of each, grew from about $300m in 1911to $900m in 1913, around $23bn in current dollars.
“列侬神父，你有钱吗？请买下标准石油公司。”据说1911年，约翰·D.洛克菲勒在听到最高法院裁定他的石油公司将被分拆成34家小公司的消息时，就是这么对他的牧师高尔夫球伙伴说的。这是个好建议。几年内，这些公司的价值增长了三倍。洛克菲勒拥有两家公司25%以上的股份，其净资产从1911年的3亿美元增长到1913年的9亿美元，相当于现在的230亿美元。
A break-up of today’s tech titans—Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple—could also unlock vast value, say some with an eye on the industry. If the most radical plan, proposed by Elizabeth Warren, a leading Democratic contender for America’s presidency, were fully implemented, by some calculations the parts spun off alone could be worth over $2trn—roughly half the value of the four complete firms today.
一些关注该行业的人士表示，如今的科技巨头（谷歌、亚马逊、Facebook和苹果）的分拆也可能释放出巨大的价值。如果由美国总统的主要民主党竞争者伊丽莎白•沃伦提出的最激进的计划得到全面实施，根据一些计算，仅剥离出来的部分就价值超过2万亿美元，大约是今天四家完整公司价值的一半。
Ms Warren’s two-pronged scheme was presented in March, but it is now coming under closer scrutiny as her campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination gathers steam. The first part is relatively straightforward. She intends to unwind tech mergers deemed “anticompetitive” because they were undertaken to neutralise potential competitors. This is mainly aimed at Facebook, which in 2012 bought Instagram, a picture-heavy social network, for $1bn and in 2014 paid $19bn for WhatsApp, an instant-messaging service. Both of these, industry insiders argue, could have become serious rivals to Facebook. But Ms Warren also aims to undo other deals, such as DoubleClick, an advertising exchange bought by Google, and Whole Foods, a grocery chain acquired by Amazon.
沃伦的双管齐下的计划于今年3月提出，但随着她争取民主党总统候选人提名的活动逐渐升温，该计划目前正受到更密切的关注。第一部分相对简单。她打算撤销被视为“反竞争”的科技企业合并，因为这些合并是为了中和潜在竞争对手。这主要是针对Facebook的。2012年，Facebook斥资10亿美元收购了以图片为主的社交网络Instagram，2014年又斥资190亿美元收购了即时通讯服务WhatsApp。业内人士认为，这两家公司都可能成为Facebook的劲敌。但沃伦还打算撤销其它交易，例如谷歌收购的广告交易所DoubleClick，以及亚马逊收购的杂货连锁店Whole Foods。

The second prong requires more explanation. The tech titans are mostly two-headed beasts. They not only operate a market but compete in it too. Amazon owns the world’s biggest e-commerce marketplace and also sells products on it under its private labels. Apple hosts the app store on the iPhone but also offers its own apps. This creates incentives for these firms to promote their wares unfairly, for instance by showing them at the top of the result pages of their search engines.

第二个方面需要更多的解释。科技巨头大多是双头兽。他们不仅经营一个市场，而且也参与竞争。亚马逊拥有世界上最大的电子商务市场，并在上面销售自有品牌的产品。苹果在iPhone上有应用程序商店，但也提供自己的应用程序。这就为这些公司提供了不公平的促销手段，比如在搜索引擎的结果页面顶部显示他们的产品。
Ms Warren wants operators of any online marketplace which generates annual global revenues of more than $25bn to be declared “platform utilities” and prohibited from both owning a platform and doing business on it. At a minimum this would mean, for instance, that Amazon would have to spin off its private brands, in particular Amazon Basics. Apple would have to shed such apps as Mail and Maps.
沃伦希望，任何每年全球营收超过250亿美元的在线市场的运营商，都应被宣布为“平台公用事业公司”，不得同时拥有一个平台，并在其上开展业务。至少，这意味着，例如，亚马逊将不得不剥离其私有品牌，特别是Amazon Basics。苹果将不得不放弃邮件和地图等应用。
Determining the effect of break-ups is tricky, though an analysis of the revenues of various parts of the tech titans’ businesses gives a sense of their worth. Equity analysts who engage in “sum-of-the parts” (SOTP) analysis also try to estimate the value of bits of a business using similar firms as a yardstick. Their over-excited assessments of how much these might be worth sometimes look like flights of fancy. But the approach may work reasonably well for business units that have closely comparable peers, such as Instagram. In June Bloomberg Intelligence reckoned that Instagram would fetch $100bn (although some in Silicon Valley put the number much higher, at around $200bn, because of its fast growth). Brent Thill of Jefferies, a bank, values Amazon’s online retail business (including Amazon Basics, but without its marketplace) at nearly $200bn and the firm’s physical stores (mostly Whole Foods) at up to $6bn.
确定拆分的影响是棘手的，尽管对这些科技巨头各个业务部门的收入进行分析，可以得出它们的价值。从事“部分总和”分析的股票分析师也试图以类似的公司作为衡量标准来评估企业的部分价值。他们对这些资产价值的过度兴奋的评估有时看起来就像是异想天开。不过，对于Instagram 等业务部门来说，这种方法可能会相当有效，因为它们的同类产品差不多。今年6月，据彭博资讯估计，Instagram 的售价将达到1000亿美元(尽管硅谷的一些人认为这个数字要高得多，大约2000亿美元，因为增长迅速)。Jefferies 银行的布伦特•蒂尔估计，亚马逊的在线零售业务(包括亚马逊基础业务，但不包括其市场)价值近2000亿美元，实体店(主要是Whole Foods)价值高达60亿美元。
If good comparisons and financial data are absent, such estimates are more art than science, says Brian Wieser of Group m, the world’s largest advertising buyer. That makes it even harder to put a number on Google’s advertising business as a whole (Jefferies’ estimate is $539bn). Ms Warren wants to split it into an ad marketplace and services that operate in it. But valuing its constituent parts is guesswork. The firm is not forthcoming with numbers.
世界上最大的广告采购商m集团的 Brian Wieser 说，如果没有良好的比较和财务数据，这样的估计就更像是艺术而不是科学。这使得谷歌的广告业务整体数字更难确定(杰富瑞(Jefferies)估计为5390亿美元)。沃伦希望将其拆分为一个广告市场和在其中运营的服务。但对其组成部分的估值只是猜测。该公司不愿透露具体数字。
These are not the only problems. WhatsApp, despite the whopping price Facebook paid for it, does not make much money, which makes assessing its worth hard. Trying to estimate a price for Apple’s and Google’s apps would be hopeless.
这些还不是唯一的问题。尽管 Facebook 为 WhatsApp 支付了高昂的价格，但它并没有赚到多少钱，这使得评估它的价值变得很困难。试图估算苹果和谷歌应用程序的价格是没有希望的。
The fuzziness of Ms Warren’s plan also makes estimating a total break-up value difficult. If Facebook has to part with WhatsApp, why should it keep Messenger, its other instant-messaging service? Or why should Apple keep iMessage? Both may be regarded as services on top of a platform utility. It is similarly unclear what would happen to the app stores of Apple and Google or the cloud-computing arms of Amazon and Google (and Microsoft’s, for that matter, a rival to Amazon). A spin-off of Amazon Web Services, for example, would create the world’s second-mostvaluable corporate IT firm. It would be worth $438bn, says Morgan Stanley, a bank—about four times more than IBM.
沃伦计划的模糊性也使得估算拆分总额变得困难。如果Facebook不得不与WhatsApp 拆分，它为什么还要保留另一款即时通讯服务Messenger呢？或者苹果为什么要保留iMessage？两者都可以看作是平台实用程序之上的服务。同样不清楚的是，苹果和谷歌的应用商店、亚马逊和谷歌的云计算部门(就此而言，微软是亚马逊的竞争对手)会发生什么。例如，亚马逊网络服务的分拆将创造出世界上第二大最有价值的企业IT公司。摩根斯坦利表示，这个数字将达到4380亿美元，大约是IBM的四倍。

来源：经济学人