Beyond the Marketing Waffle
The phrase smart city often sounds like pure corporate waffle. To me, it conjures up images of talking bins and pointless smartphone applications. Yet the underlying investment case is surprisingly grounded. We are looking at real businesses providing connected energy grids, sustainable construction materials, and intelligent transit software.
The dull businesses often do the heavy lifting.
Take a company like Builders FirstSource. They supply prefabricated structural components for housing. It sounds incredibly boring. But boring often translates to structural and sustained demand when cities are under pressure to build millions of homes with much lower carbon footprints. Then you have software platforms like Samsara, which collect data from construction sites to make operations safer and more efficient. These are the companies getting their hands dirty in the background.