A trillion dollars is a lot of money.
Tech giant Apple sported a trillion-dollar market cap … for a stretch. From August 2 to November 1, the late Steve Jobs’ firm traded above that level.
It even closed above $1.1 trillion four times.
Fellow mega cap Amazon got there as well. On September 4, its market cap briefly reached the $1 trillion mark.
Clearly, these are huge numbers.
But why do I mention them?
There is an industry that you need to be paying attention to.
Smart people — people in the know — are saying its rise to a trillion-dollar valuation is a matter of when, not if.
And the numbers don’t lie. The growth in this space has been huge.
It has already displaced a business that you may have never expected would go away.
Read on to learn more…
A Trillion-Dollar Industry
The industry I’m referring to is ride-sharing.
It is set to become a trillion-dollar industry.
And if you don’t believe that, let’s consider the disruption it is making.
Morgan Stanley says 4% of all miles traveled worldwide in 2015 were from ride-sharing. It expects that will grow to at least 25% by 2030.
Per expense management software firm Certify, ride-sharing services had a 59% share of the corporate ground-transport market in the first quarter of 2017.
One year later, that share increased to 71%.
By comparison, taxis only accounted for 6% of corporate travel.
Did you ever think this would happen?
And the disparity should continue. It costs more to use a taxi, on average, than a ride-sharing service.
Let’s think about this.
Uber gave its first ride in San Francisco in July 2010.
It then expanded in the U.S. and globally … the next year.
Today, it is the go-to choice for business travel.
It has only taken a few years for us to embrace this form of travel.
What Is Holding Ride-Sharing Back?
When you’re traveling for business, you don’t have as many choices to get from place to place.
When you’re at home, though, you may not have considered getting rid of your car(s).
I propose you will … and sooner than you think.
Today, ride-sharing remains constrained by costs.
Mobility-focused firm Ridecell shows the cost per mile for your personal vehicle remains less than Uber.
Your costs include your car, insurance and other operating costs. Ride-sharing costs include many of these things … and the driver.
However, autonomous vehicles will remove the driver from the equation.
That is likely to bring the cost of your vehicle and the automated ride-sharing service in line with each other.
In other words, if you want to ditch your car and only hail rides using your phone, you won’t have to pay any more to do so.
You may still want to have a car for a last-minute errand or something like that.
But many of you have two or more cars. Even if you keep one of them, you’ll still be able to downsize and put some money in your pocket.
Uber is preparing for its initial public offering this year.
Analysts say it may be worth as much as $120 billion … and it’s only one of the players in this space.
When you go driverless, this industry will easily be worth a trillion dollars. More likely, several times that.
(By the way, this will be a huge issue for many of the automakers. But that’s a subject of another piece.)
So What?
In many respects, we are already in Jetsons-like times.
In the case of our cars, we soon will be.
People in the know say we may be using self-driving vehicles in as few as 10 years.
Maybe it’ll be more … maybe it’ll be less.
But when it happens, I believe it will change your life.
Will you be ready for it?
Good investing,
Brian Christopher
Editor, Insider Profit Trader
P.S. The Certify report cited above noted one ride-sharing company saw its share of total U.S. ride-sharing receipts nearly double in 18 months.
And users rated the service with more stars than the competition.
In Insider Profit Trader, one of our recommendations is a way to buy shares in this company — and other innovative tech names — at a discount to their net asset values.
Ride-sharing is getting bigger. Click here to learn more about how you can participate in the boom.