찰리 멍거의 탁월한 가르침이다. 잘 기억해야겠다.

Here’s a model that we’ve had trouble with. Maybe you’ll be able to figure it out better. Many markets get down to two or three big competitors, or five or six. And in some of those markets, nobody makes any money to speak of. But in others, everybody does very well.

Over the years, we’ve tried to figure out why the competition in some markets gets sort of rational from the investor’s point of view so that the shareholders do well, while in other markets there’s destructive competition that destroys shareholder wealth.

If it’s a pure commodity like airline seats, you can understand why no one makes any money. As we sit here, just think of what airlines have given to the world: safe travel, greater experience, time with your loved ones, you name it. Yet the net amount of money that’s been made by the shareholders of airlines since Kitty Hawk is now a negative figure—a substantial negative figure. Competition was so intense that, once it was unleashed by deregulation, it ravaged shareholder wealth in the airline business.

Yet in other fields—like cereals, for example—almost all the big boys make out. If you’re some kind of a medium grade cereal maker, you might make 15 percent on your capital. And if you’re really good, you might make 40 percent. But why are cereals so profitable, despite the fact that it looks to me like they’re competing like crazy with promotions, coupons, and everything else? I don’t fully understand it. Obviously, there’s a brand identity factor in cereals that doesn’t exist in airlines. That must be the main factor that accounts for it. And maybe the cereal makers, by and large, have learned to be less crazy about fighting for market share—because if you get even one person who’s hell bent on gaining market share … For example, if I were Kellogg and I decided that I had to have 60 percent of the market, I think I could take most of the profit out of cereals. I’d ruin Kellogg in the process. But I think I could do it.

In some businesses, the participants behave like a demented Kellogg. In other businesses, they don’t. Unfortunately, I do not have a perfect model for predicting how that’s going to happen. For example, if you look around at bottler markets, you’ll find many markets where bottlers of Pepsi and Coke both make a lot of money and many others where they destroy most of the profitability of the two franchises.

어떤 산업은 경쟁이 치열해도 수익성이 좋고, 어떤 산업은 그렇지 않은 이유를 찰리 멍거도 모르겠다고 한다.

내 생각에는 각 플레이어들이 ‘경쟁에 혈안이 됐는지 아닌지’가 중요해보인다. 이는 각 업체 리더 성향과 에고에 따른 것이고, 따라서 운이다.

가격을 보면 시장이 보인다. 가격이 계속 내려가면 치킨 게임이다. 화장품 로드숍이 대표적이고, 공유 킥보드 시장도 마찬가지였다.(앞으로는 어떨지 모르겠다.)

시멘트, 통신, 편의점은 경쟁이 치열함에도 불구히고 수익성이 높다. 특히 시멘트는 플레이어 수가 많은데도 오랫동안 안정적이었다.(물론, 담합이었다.)