Zona Research Inc, Redwood City, California reckons it has spotted two giant keiretsu – the Japanese-style extended corporate family whose members do business with each other in preference to outsiders – forming in the Internet information content delivery and usage businesss. Zona dubs them info-keiretsu, and its two are Microsoft Corp, General Electric Co Inc with its NBC subsidiary, British Telecomunications Plc, MCI Communications Corp, News Corp Pty Ltd, Dreamworks SKG, Digital Equipment Corp and CompuServe Inc – and despite it also being English-speaking, Zona reckons British Telecom is in there because the others want it to spearhead development of non-English alliances. Zona’s second info-keiretsu is focused around AT&T Corp, IBM Corp, Walt Disney Co, Time-Warner Inc, Knight-Ridder Inc and Netscape Communications Corp. Zona reckons that this one, which via Disney includes Cap Cities/ABC could eventually be seen as the more global keiretsu, rocking the positioning of the first info-keiretsu – although that would be over Rupert Murdoch’s dead body. The original Japanese keiretsu formed during the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s in reaction to the break-up of the ziabatsu family-controlled corporate groups that ruled a majority of Japan’s large industrial, financial and service firms prior to World War II. Our only comment at this stage would be that the Japanese keiretsu are much more stable than the new groupings, which often involve alliances in one country with people one competes with in another, are likely to be. The Emerging Info-Keiretsu newsletter is $295.
