Posts
Airbus shows: Customer data is valuable – also in B2B business
Airbus wants to charge aircraft maintenance companies for access to necessary data in the future. Handelsblatt refers to a report by the specialist portal “MRO Network”, according to which this information has not yet been officially confirmed, but is already causing a stir in the industry.
“That (customer) data has a value should have become clear to us at the latest when we look at the stock market valuation of Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon, Airbnb or Uber”, explains Hans-Christian Riekhof, Professor of International Marketing at PFH Private University of Göttingen. The value of these companies is largely not based on physical assets. Some of these companies even report high losses and still achieve high company valuations.
Companies benefit from customer data provided free of charge, which they resell
The reason for this, according to Professor Riekhof, is the value of the customer data that these companies have. Data that they partly resell and that is usually provided to them by customers free of charge. “A second aspect should not be completely overlooked: already in the basic lecture on economics one learns that one can make decent profits in monopoly situations.”
According to Riekhof, data is valuable has now also become known in the B2B business. “A very nice example in this respect is Airbus: there is a dispute with the suppliers or with the maintenance industry about who may use the data and who has to pay what price for it.”
Airbus sees intellectual property in customer data that represents a value
According to the MRO Network report, maintenance companies are to pay a certain percentage of the amount they themselves charge the airlines for maintaining the jets to the European aircraft manufacturer as a data fee in the future. Airbus has so far provided essential data free of charge, while others used it for their business. But Airbus sees intellectual property in them, which represents a value, access to which must be rewarded with usage fees in the future.
As Handelsblatt further explains, it is about future data sovereignty in aviation. In addition to Airbus, Boing and maintenance companies such as Lufthansa Technik also want to play a leading role in the evaluation of the data. Airbus, for example, wants to record 10,000 aircraft from 100 companies on its Skywise platform by the end of the year.
Photo: pixabay.com