Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1433652
DECEMBER 2021 I SMT007 MAGAZINE 73 industry as a simple example, people are will- ing to pay manufacturer's suggested retail price (MSRP) on a car right now because invento- ries are tight, and they've got the ability. In some cases, they're getting attractive financ- ing options. Some are even paying over MSRP. But that is not a typical situation for the auto industry. Typically, buyers pay about 85% of the sticker price in a normal year. It's a great time to be an auto dealer, but that's not going to last; as inventories rise, it will be much hard- er to sell vehicles at the sticker price. Matties: e same could be said for the real es- tate industry as well. It's a great time to be a re- altor. We're starting to see price decreases in the real estate market. DuBravac: Right. If you look at real estate, you're going to see some pressure on pricing. Some of what has happened is people rethinking the quality of life they want—where they want to live, needing a different-sized space, wanting to be in or out of the city. When that settles out, we get a new equilibrium. What makes it different than, say, 2009 is that we don't have a lot of excess and predatory lending. So that piece of the dynamic has changed. I point this out just to say that we're not going to go into an environment where you see a free fall of housing prices. We are under inventory in housing because the last 10 years we've un- derbuilt housing. So, part of the reason pric- es have gone up is because there's a dearth of available homes for people. ere are pres- sures that will keep prices from deteriorating significantly. Matties: Sure. What emerging markets do you think the industries should be preparing for? DuBravac: Just in the last two weeks, we've had major announcements around virtual digital environments. Facebook obviously renamed their whole umbrella company to Meta. Micro- so announced at Microso Ignite that they were bringing Mesh to Microso Teams which will bring the mixed-reality capabilities to Teams. ey talked a lot about the metaverse. Whether we call it XR or the metaverse, I think there's a tremendous opportunity there. Had we been further along in that roadmap, I think that you would have seen a large uptake and an acceleration for mixed reality as we went into the COVID shutdown, but we just didn't have the hardware or the service infra- structure in place. e metaverse is definitely an emerging market to watch. Another area to watch is the transition from digitization to datafication. Part of this tran- sition involves bringing greater computation power to areas that only recently were digi- tized. One of the great examples of this data- fication is the MBUX Hyperscreen curved dis- play that Mercedes introduced earlier this year. It extends pillar-to-pillar across the dashboard of the car, with a multicore central processing unit (CPU). is screen uses artificial intelli- gence and has what is called a "Zero Layer" in- terface which uses voice and touch. So, now we're seeing the computerization of that dash- board. Google has announced some major ini- tiatives to change the dashboard as well. is is just one example of what is happening in ev- ery industry. e broad electrification of vehicles is anoth- er big trend and we have just barely seen the cusp of that. But all the auto manufacturers are pushing in that direction and inevitably that will come. is ties into a much broader nar- rative related to the environmental, social, and