Large scale, capital intensive commodities production is not very employment-intensive, nor does it link well with other sectors of an economy.
The downstream refining business traditionally is a low-margin, capital-intensive commodity business.
Not the kind of returns that were hyped up nearly a decade ago by Sand Hill Road's best and brightest, sure, and certainly not in the kind of upstream, capital-intensive, commodity manufacturing plays that were en vogue back then.
They were either labor intensive, capital intensive or vulnerable to the cost and supply of a key commodity.
This merits a post in of itself, but the kinds of things that VCs were drawn to in video have all become commodities, namely: video aggregators, content delivery networks and content management systems, which are capital intensive, low margin areas always at the risk of getting cancelled and shifted to a competitor.
"Professional corporations are generally not capital intensive," Mr. McCabe said.
Now, that's a gamble as well, because anything might change in the next month, year, two years, and some of these projects are quite labor and capital intensive at the onset, and it can take years for them to pay out — but I think that's a way in which these commodity-contract markets are tools for what we might call price discovery, which is pretty much what it sounds like.
It's very capital intensive.
Space exploration is a capital intensive business.
It's capital intensive to pay people.
The Sailfish OS is very R&D capital intensive.
