Weekly Insights Jul 15, 2016

Executive Summary

• This week’s note “From the Desk of Deborah Weinswig” explores how Amazon’s highly successful second-annual Prime Day has disrupted retail and encouraged competitors to offer summer promotions of their own in addition to changing their behavior in several ways.
• As e-commerce continues to grow, retailers are leasing warehouse space at record-setting rates. In the second quarter of 2016, companies leased 70.1 million square feet of industrial space, up 6% from the year-ago quarter. Developers are racing to build more warehouses to meet demand, but, in the meantime, rents have been increasing.
• London’s iconic Oxford Street expects to see a £1 billion lift in annual sales from the Crossrail Elizabeth line. Oxford Street already generates £5 billion per year in sales and the New West End Company hopes it will hit an annual target of £6 billion by 2020.
• The Singapore government will cooperate with Microsoft to build prototype chatbots to improve public services. First, it will build bots capable of answering simple factual questions. Next, it will focus on bots that help citizens finish transactions within government websites. Finally, it will customize the chatbots to better serve each user’s needs.