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The world’s most valuable resource is no longer oil, but data

economist.com

11–20 of 25 posts

Re: The world’s most valuable resource is no longer oil, but data

#11
post #5

Plain wrong. To compare company sizes: Google est. $500 billion Saudi Aramco est. $10,000 billion (!) Google is ~5% of Saudi Aramco.

Such a bizarre comparison. Google is not all data, and Saudi Aramco is not all oil. Saudi Aramco also has refining and shipping operations. Finally, Saudi Aramco is privately held by Saudi Arabia, not publicly trade and valued my the market.

Re: The world’s most valuable resource is no longer oil, but data

#12
post #5

Plain wrong. To compare company sizes: Google est. $500 billion Saudi Aramco est. $10,000 billion (!) Google is ~5% of Saudi Aramco.

Such a bizarre comparison. Google is not all data, and Saudi Aramco is not all oil. Saudi Aramco also has refining and shipping operations. Finally, Saudi Aramco is privately held by Saudi Arabia, not publicly trade and valued my the market.

The company itself might not be traded on stock exchanges, but the products are. Which means, the moment you own 20% of all the oil on the planet, and 25% of the gas [1] , you can compute the value of the company quite easily.

And this value dwarfs Google and Apple very easily.

[1] http://www.londonlovesbusiness.com/business-news/finance/sto...

Re: The world’s most valuable resource is no longer oil, but data

#13
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Such a bizarre comparison. Google is not all data, and Saudi Aramco is not all oil. Saudi Aramco also has refining and shipping operations. Finally, Saudi Aramco is privately held by Saudi Arabia, not publicly trade and valued my the market.

The company itself might not be traded on stock exchanges, but the products are. Which means, the moment you own 20% of all the oil on the planet, and 25% of the gas [1] , you can compute the value of the company quite easily. And this value dwarfs Google and Apple very easily. [1] http://www.londonlovesbusiness.com/business-news/finance/sto...

I know very little about economics, but it seems very weird to me to compute the value of an oil company based on the current price of oil and the reserves it owns. Not all oil it owns is for sale right now at that price and it is very unlikely that the price for oil will stay the same until all reserves are depleted.

Re: The world’s most valuable resource is no longer oil, but data

#14
post #10

This article is wrong not because as some point out oil is still more valuable commodity, but because it targets the wrong product. The most valuable resource is knowledge not data. I can sell you trillions of data points from many different devices and sensors, but in itself they are worthless. However, if you can get any insights, any knowledge from these data point the situation will change. It it's not the data t…

The value is in extracting meaningful information for decision making using data. Data is the crude. The one who wins is the one who knows how to make it fuel?

Re: The world’s most valuable resource is no longer oil, but data

#15
post #7

The movie "Sneakers" made this point in 1992: "Cosmo: There's a war out there, old friend. A world war. And it's not about who's got the most bullets. It's about who controls the information. What we see and hear, how we work, what we think... it's all about the information! The world isn't run by weapons anymore, or energy, or money. It's run by little ones and zeroes, little bits of data. It's all just electrons."

I read that last word as "elections" and the statement seemed quite prescient.

Re: The world’s most valuable resource is no longer oil, but data

#16

> many of their services are free (users pay, in effect, by handing over yet more data) Not just with loss of privacy, they also pay with increased cost of goods and services that are used to pay for the advertisement > Governments could encourage the emergence of new services by opening up more of their own data vaults or managing crucial parts of the data economy as public infrastructure, as India does with its dig…

This assumes that advertising will not be paid for otherwise, which is not true. Digital advertising might be cheaper than traditional one

Re: The world’s most valuable resource is no longer oil, but data

#17
post #5

Plain wrong. To compare company sizes: Google est. $500 billion Saudi Aramco est. $10,000 billion (!) Google is ~5% of Saudi Aramco.

An estimate by a respected third party gave its valuation at just $400 billion. [1]

Even with a recent tax reduction to boost its market capitalization, most analysts believe it is not worth more than $1.5 trillion. If you consider a foreseeable future, Google could likely surpass that as its services increase in value while oil is threatened by alternative energy.

Overall, the comparison seems wrong as Saudi Aramco and Google hold different proportions of value in oil/data that exist in the world.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-02-23/saudi-ara...

Re: The world’s most valuable resource is no longer oil, but data

#19
post #5

Plain wrong. To compare company sizes: Google est. $500 billion Saudi Aramco est. $10,000 billion (!) Google is ~5% of Saudi Aramco.

Such a bizarre comparison. Google is not all data, and Saudi Aramco is not all oil. Saudi Aramco also has refining and shipping operations. Finally, Saudi Aramco is privately held by Saudi Arabia, not publicly trade and valued my the market.

Not long to go. IPO is next year.

> Last year, he said he expected the IPO would value Aramco at least $2 trillion. Any valuation would account for both oil price expectations and the size of Saudi Arabia's proven oil reserves.

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-saudi-aramco-ipo-idUSKBN17...

Re: The world’s most valuable resource is no longer oil, but data

#20

> The world’s most valuable resource is no longer oil, but data As I read this I'm sipping clean, drinkable water. Give it a decade or so. If you thought the wars over oil were bad, wait till you see the wars over water.

Why do you think water is going to run out in a decade?

70% of the planet is water. More water than all of landmass and biomass?

The Suns not going anywhere. If you figure out the oil problem with renewables then I'm pretty sure we can figure out the desalination problem too.

I would say once we humans figure out cheap distributed energy (solar/wind) a lot of things become easier.

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