Future of Telcos - phone companies, next-generation telecommunications, winners and losers in post COVID global shakeout, mega-mergers, controlling the world's bandwidth and smartphone platforms, e-commerce and mobile payments - keynote speaker

Futurist Keynote Speaker: Posts, Slides, Videos - Future of Telcos Keynotes, Smartphones,Omnichannel

Telcos had a massive boost from the COVID pandemic.  I work with many of the world's largest telcos. They all benefitted hugely from instant shift towards virtual work, virtual social life, virtual entertainment and virtual leisure. Huge increase in spending on personal bandwidth, increased use of personal devices. Huge increase in corporate spending on enterprise wide virtual working tools, upgrades of video conferencing equipment, upgrades in bandwidth with increased dependence on video

If we ever realised our total dependence on high bandwidth, it was at the moment that the world plunged into lockdown. Internet access or speed was no longer the issue, rather continuous, uninterrupted high bandwidth to allow high quality video links. However, the telco industry faced fundamental issues before COVID, and these issues remain.

Over 90% of all web traffic is now video in many developed nations - COVID just accelerated a long trend.  It is already the case in the UK that BBC iPlayer, NetFlix and YouTube alone account for more than 60% of the nation’s web traffic. A single 2-hour video is equivalent to a hundred million emails, or days of voice calls. So forget charging for voice or anything else – costs are dwarfed by streaming video. Data on mobiles will increase 1000 fold in the next 5 years, on 50 billion mobile devices connected to 5G, running at 10gps or higher. That means an entire high-definition movie will download in less than 3 seconds.  So telcos will be forced to focus on new kinds of business, for example cloud services for larger companies.

Read more: Future of Telcos - phone companies, next-generation telecommunications, winners and losers in post COVID global shakeout, mega-mergers, controlling the world's bandwidth and smartphone platforms, e-commerce and mobile payments - keynote speaker

Future of Medical Tourism - $40 billion a year industry, over 11 million people travelling to other nations for lower cost hospital treatments, health care, dentistry or cosmetic surgery. Organ trafficking. Medical tourism will grow to $130bn by 2025.

Futurist Keynote Speaker: Posts, Slides, Videos - Health, Coronavirus Speaker Future Pharma Keynotes

One way to reduce health costs for individuals, insurers or government is to move patients abroad for treatment, and we will see a lot more of this in a world beyond COVID.

‘Medical tourism’ is already a $40bn industry, growing 20% a year, with over 11 million people annually travelling to another country for private treatment, and possibly convalescence in a nice hotel.  The market could be worth over $130bn by 2025. 

The savings in all types of medical tourism can be huge: private health care in Brazil is only 25% of the cost in America, India 73%, Mexico 50%, Thailand 65%, Turkey 60%. Within the EU itself there are also major cost differences – for example, dental treatment in Hungary is far cheaper than in Paris.

Read more: Future of Medical Tourism - $40 billion a year industry, over 11 million people travelling to other nations for lower cost hospital treatments, health care, dentistry or cosmetic surgery. Organ trafficking. Medical tourism will grow to $130bn by 2025.

Future of Education - radical changes coming. Major rethink about how to prepare children and students for the next 30-50 years. Trends in High School education, Colleges, Universities, Business Schools and Post-Graduate Education. Keynote speaker

Futurist Keynote Speaker: Posts, Slides, Videos - Future of Education, School, Universities, Keynote

The COVID pandemic forced major changes in education, some of which will endure.  Over the next three decades, education will start younger in many nations than today.  Education outside the home for 3-5 year olds increased by 10% to 85% in OECD nations in the decade to 2016.  This will be driven by two-career parents, and by research showing how important early learning is to later success.

School and college is all about preparing a new generation for their own future. In many cases, we will be educating for jobs that have yet to be invented, but most teaching is locked into the past, training for tasks that no longer exist. 

Take examinations: how absurd to force young people to scribe indelible symbols onto pieces of paper, and to lock them into rooms without access to their digital brains. Cambridge University is considering allowing students to write exam papers on laptops, partly because examiners can’t read their terrible handwriting. Many other Universities have already started giving permission to write exams answers on computers if people have a disability which means that writing is difficult or impossible.  Yet handwriting in exams will still be the dominant mechanism for proving student knowledge by the year 2030 in almost every part of the world. Work means using keyboards, not pen and ink.

Read more: Future of Education - radical changes coming. Major rethink about how to prepare children and students for the next 30-50 years. Trends in High School education, Colleges, Universities, Business Schools and Post-Graduate Education. Keynote speaker

Future of Retail in Emerging Markets - Asia, Latin America, Africa - boom of chains and informal retailers - retail trends keynote speaker

Futurist Keynote Speaker: Posts, Slides, Videos - Manufacturing, Logistics, Supply Chain Keynotes

From Uganda to Congo, India to Vietnam, we will continue to see an almost identical retail experience. Almost all shops in the whole world will continue to be the roughly the size of a single shipping container – never much wider or deeper or higher. One outlet next to another for mile after mile. COVID had no impact on this megatrend despite all the media hype.

Such shops, typically with brick walls and tin roofs, are often living rooms of families who own them, and bedrooms at night. Lit by a single light bulb, such stores have an almost identical range of products as ten or twenty other similar shops within a few hundred metres. We see clusters of clothes shops, clusters of metal working shops, clusters of furniture shops. The most important rule in retail location has always been co-opetition. And this will be as true in the slums of a megacity as on the streets of Paris or New York. Jewellers will continue to cluster, fish sellers will cluster. Retail clustering will dominate physical retail globally for the next 100 years.

Malls will take off in all emerging markets. At the same time, expect growth in top-down mass-retailing in emerging markets, despite e-commerce. Big companies will invade a completely new area where there has never been a single store a fraction of the size before. The first mall in a new area will usually be relatively informal, not air-conditioned, housing smaller shops. And then premium malls will follow, identical in many ways to malls in Europe, Singapore, Beijing and North America.

Read more: Future of Retail in Emerging Markets - Asia, Latin America, Africa - boom of chains and informal retailers - retail trends keynote speaker

Are robots really about to take over the world? Why sales of robots have grown slowly. Future of AI / Artificial intelligence. Impact of robots and automation on jobs / unemployment and economic growth - keynote speaker

Futurist Keynote Speaker: Posts, Slides, Videos - Manufacturing, Logistics, Supply Chain Keynotes

Despite all the talk of robots taking over most menial jobs and putting tens of millions out of work, the growth of robots in factories has been slow – up from 92,000 to a mere 387,000 a year from 2000 to 2017. A third of that increase was in 2017. Compare this to growth of smartphones, for instance, and the pace is still snail-like. Sales of such robots are likely to increase by around 10-15% a year – mostly confined to the auto industry, which owns most robots in America. Robots will become cheaper and more intelligent, but smaller models will still cost over $20,000 each in 2020.

Expect rapid growth in military robots – with tens of thousands of drones owned by the Pentagon alone, raising the prospect of swarms of small, semi-autonomous flying robots being thrown into the air above a major battle zone. “Suicide drones” will soon be available on the open market, able to fly 80 miles an hour, to detonate explosives at any target 40 miles away.

Read more: Are robots really about to take over the world? Why sales of robots have grown slowly. Future of AI / Artificial intelligence. Impact of robots and automation on jobs / unemployment and economic growth - keynote speaker

Future of Global Trade, Logistics and Supply Chain Management- scandal of empty containers and boom in regional trade v global. Reducing supply chain risks and disruptions from more global events like the COVID pandemic - keynote speaker

Futurist Keynote Speaker: Posts, Slides, Videos - Manufacturing, Logistics, Supply Chain Keynotes

Moving a container 150km by lorry from Birmingham to Southampton costs the same as moving the same container 10,000km by sea from Southampton to Beijing. It is cheaper to transport melons from Istanbul to Naples than to drive melons from a village up in the Italian mountains, to the same market.  This overwhelmingly huge difference in freight costs will be one of the single greatest drivers of future global trade, despite increased energy costs. It is the primary reason why global trade has grown at twice the rate of global production over the last 30 years.

Look out for trade growth in Latin America and Africa – both of which have huge manufacturing potential close to the sea. Areas with major container ports will on average grow up to 40% faster over the next three decades than cities, regions or nations that are landlocked.

Expect over $28 trillion a year of global trade by 2030, up from more than $18 trillion in 2019. Global trade will continue to grow around 25-35% faster on average than the entire global economy. For two decades, the use of shipping containers grew twice as fast as international trade, as companies seized the opportunity to be more efficient. But the container revolution is now complete, and so the growth difference will ease.

Read more: Future of Global Trade, Logistics and Supply Chain Management- scandal of empty containers and boom in regional trade v global. Reducing supply chain risks and disruptions from more global events like the COVID pandemic - keynote speaker

Future of Fashion Industry, clothing and textiles - and why Male fashion will continue to change slowly, while female fashion will become more diverse and ethical: wages, factory conditions and environment / sustainability. Keynote speaker

Futurist Keynote Speaker: Posts, Slides, Videos - Future of Retail Keynotes: Food, Drink, Malls, Web

The fashion industry has always been about tribes: what kind of person do you want to be? With whom are you identifying by the way you dress?  Expect hundreds more highly influential 16- or 17-year-olds, each with several million social network followers who read their blogs or tweets or watch their videos, to follow suit. That's regardless of how they buy: online or at a traditional store, beyond COVID.  

The fashion and textiles industries are worth over $1.8 trillion, growing 5% a year, employing 75 million people. At present 50% of global growth in apparel sales is in China, which has overtaken the US as the largest market. But prices globally have been falling in real terms for two decades, and will continue to do so as scale increases.

In the US, the industry employs 4 million people, in 280,000 outlets for clothes and shoes. I met an American cotton manufacturer recently who makes 1,400 pairs of socks every minute. Fashion is worth over $40bn a year to the UK economy, employing over 800,000 people – more than telcos, car manufacturing and publishing combined.

Read more: Future of Fashion Industry, clothing and textiles - and why Male fashion will continue to change slowly, while female fashion will become more diverse and ethical: wages, factory conditions and environment / sustainability. Keynote speaker

Future of War: defence spending by superpowers, hybrid conflicts, space weapons, new nuclear risks, automated weapons, robot fighters and future of arms industry. Assymetric threats and terrorism, dealing with failed states

Futurist Keynote Speaker: Posts, Slides, Videos - Future of Emerging Markets, China, India - Speaker

More than $1.8 trillion is spent every year on weapons and other defence costs, or 2.5% of global GDP, down from 4% in the last days of the Cold War, equivalent to $250 per person on earth. Combined sales of the largest 100 arms companies is around $320bn a year.

However, 40% of all global military spending is by one nation alone: America, which burns up more in this way than the next 15 highest-spending nations combined. This is a truly spectacular imbalance of military fire-power, and will be unsustainable in the longer term, as we will see. Next is China with 9.5% of global military spending, followed by Russia at 5.2%, UK 3.5% and Japan 3.4%.

America needs to spend just 3% of GDP on arms to achieve such dominance – compared to Russia, which today spends 4% of a much smaller economy, China 2%, India 2%, UK 2%, France 2%, Israel 6%, Saudi Arabia 9% and Oman 12%.

This relentless build-up of ultra-powerful weaponry will continue to feed tension, resentment and fear over the next two decades. America’s army, navy and air force will be dominant globally for the next 15‒20 years, despite rapidly increasing military budgets in Russia and China.

Read more: Future of War: defence spending by superpowers, hybrid conflicts, space weapons, new nuclear risks, automated weapons, robot fighters and future of arms industry. Assymetric threats and terrorism, dealing with failed states