Ticketing in World Cup 2014!!

Ticketing in World Cup 2014!!

The total of 3,334,524 tickets for the tournament has been forecast by FIFA. Most of the tickets are distributed to groups such as commercial affiliates, hospitality clients, media rights holders and VIPs.  for each individual match, 8% of the tickets are reserved for fans of a competing team. 1.1 million are to be sold to the general public (400,000 to Brazilian residents only, 700,000 overseas and Brazilians). 

The sale of tickets to the general public has been divided into three phases and there are four categories of tickets being available to Brazilian residents. Discounted tickets are available to Brazilians aged over 60 year, students and those receiving (Bolsa Família) welfare. These are available for as little as 30 Brazilian reals (roughly US$12.50), while the most expensive ticket of the competition on general sale is a Category 1 seat for the final that retails at US$990.

 In addition to individual tickets "venue specific tickets", which give access to all matches staged in a host city (during the group stage and round of 16), and "team ticket series", which give access to all matches of a chosen team during the tournament, are also available.

On 20 August 2013 , tickets went on sale with 2.3 million requested during the first 24 hours. By the end of this first phase of sales in October 2013, over 6 million requests had been received from the general public.  FIFA staged a random draw to allocate tickets with a total of 889,305 tickets. 71.5% of these were sold to Brazilian residents. The highest number of overseas sales being to those in the United States.

Further 220,000 tickets issued on a first come, first served basis sold out within seven hours of being placed on sale in November 2013. Following the final draw in December 2013, a second phase of ticket sales began and concluded the following month, attracting over 3.5 million applications. Any remaining tickets were then made available on a first-come, first-served basis from March 2014 onward and can also be purchased in person at designated FIFA ticketing centres. 

Lessons to be learnt from Facebook's Purchase Of WhatsApp

Smartest among Smart

 Lessons to be learnt from Facebook's Purchase Of WhatsApp

     Facebook is acquiring WhatsApp, a company with at most $300M revenues, and 55 employees, for $19billion.

      In today’s globalize world very established, successful companies sell for far lower valuations.  Apple is valued at about 13 times earnings. Microsoft about 14 times earnings.Google 33 times.  These are small fractions of the nearly infinite P/E placed on WhatsApp.

       There is a leadership lesson offered here by CEO Zuckerberg’s team that is well worth learning.

1.React fast to avoid irrelevancy.

      Irrelevancy can happen remarkably fast. Communication requirements have alter the use and impact of things like images, charts and text.  All of these have the potential impact of slowly eroding the value of Facebook.

      Most leaders address  by launching new products to leverage the trend in the market. And Facebook did that.  Facebook managers and technologists not only worked on making the platform more mobile friendly, but developed Facebook’s own platform apps for photos, messaging and all kinds of new features asked by present market scenario.

”Often answers come from the market, not internal effort.”  Yet prove by this event.

       All of these actions were efforts to defend and extend the early leader’s market position. Even though the market is shifting, and trends are developing externally from the company, leadership will tend to look inside for an answer.  Leaders will often ignore the trend, disparage the competition, keep promising improvements to historical products and services.

2.Giving an acquisition independence is critical.

      How will this all be monetized into $19B?  The second brilliant leadership call by Facebook is to not answer that question, because nobody really knows.

      Facebook didn’t know how to monetize its early leadership in users, but management knew it had to find a way.Now the company has grown from practically no revenues in 2008 to almost $8B in just below 5 years.

3.    Utilization of money

     $19B is a huge amount of money.  Unless you don’t really spend $19B. Facebook has the blessed ability to print its own currency. Private money that it can use for acquisitions. As long as Facebook has a very high market valuation it can make acquisitions with shares, rather than real money.                                  

By making acquisitions with Facebook shares the leadership team is able to link the newly acquired managers to the same overall goals as Facebook, while offering an extremely high price but without actually having to raise any money – or spend all that money.

Conclusion

       The leaders of Facebook are giving us a lesson in an alternative approach. 

(1)Recognize the market shift.  Accept it.  If there is a better solution, rush toward it rather than ignoring it. (2) Bring it into the company, and leave it independent.  Eschew integration and efforts to find “synergy.”  (You never know, in three years the company may need to be renamed WhatsApp to reflect a new market paradigm.)  

(3) And as long as you can convince investors that you are maintaining your relevancy use your highly valued stock as currency to keep the company moving forward.