Lidl vol plantar cara a AWS? El pla de Schwarz Digits i STACKIT per a un núvol europeu

How are you, my dear friends? How are you? Welcome to a new video here on the manual channel. It was a coincidence, I promise you, it was a coincidence, but as soon as I finish recording this video I'm going into the studio because to my surprise I've been called by German public radio and television to do an interview. And why is this? Well, because lately I've been talking quite a bit about Germany and the problems it has that affect us a lot , even though we don't usually talk much about the subject as a society in general, since Germany is the most important economy in Europe and the European Union really depends a lot on the whole framework that created, to use a redundant phrase, the currency around its economy and now it has many problems and very serious ones and some of them difficult to solve and precisely, well, they have become interested in this view that I have, we must have been doing something right or explaining it well in the nutshell on our main and classic channel where we talk about all topics that are not automotive. And well, I'm telling you this because soon when that interview is made public, I suppose it will be uploaded to the cloud and I'll post it here. And I say it's a triple coincidence. Firstly, because I received a call from German public radio and television. Secondly, because I talked about Lidl on the channel and everything surrounding this company. And as we investigate, it's so interesting that we had to record a new video, which is this video I'm recording right now, and I'm going to show it to you because you might be amazed by what I'm going to tell you. The owner behind Lidl, Mr. Dietter Scharz, which would be something like Black Theodoric translated into Spanish— Dieter comes from Dietrich, there's no direct translation, well, that's the least important thing—but Mr. Black, which is another coincidence, since I'm dressed in black, one of the richest men in Germany, has a plan to try to create a technological platform that can really compete with the big giants of Silicon Valley. And this is something little known that I wanted to tell you about anyway. And precisely all these coincidences, as you can see, lead to the issue of how a company that sells you deodorant, that sells you milk, that sells you any kind of hardware product or any kind of food product, can compete with the monsters of Silicon Valley, can compete with Google, with Amazon or with Microsoft itself. Well, that's what this video is about, because what we more or less revealed in the previous Lidl video, which I'm going to recommend at the end so you can learn exactly how Lidl has done what it's doing, in this one we're going to delve into everything behind the world of supermarkets, which of course continues to be its main source of growth and its main source of funding.

Let's get to it. Well, for those who don't know, the Shar group is the largest retailer in Europe and one of the largest in the world. It handles no less than 185 billion euros in annual revenue. And all this has also led Mr. Suarzar to a tremendously interesting business ecosystem , which is what we are going to focus on in this video, from the supermarket to high-tech companies. This is unusual, as is also unusual, but very European precisely, that this person who controls this entire conglomerate of companies is someone with a profile very similar to Amancia Ortega. He's not the age, he's younger, but he's a person who completely shuns fame, completely shuns the press, and very little is known about him beyond the fact that he is one of the wealthiest people in Germany, if not the richest in Germany. I haven't fully verified this information, but some media outlets report him as the richest man in Germany. At the very least, it's in the top three, so we're not mistaken. Well, as you can see, this is a very different kind of entrepreneur than the Silicon Valley megastar, but what this man has built truly has nothing to envy from what happens on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. And that is because Germany is often capable of both the best and the worst. And although we have always criticized, and I personally have criticized, the general delay in Germany regarding the digitization of society and its companies, here we have, on the contrary, the company, the large European company, with one of the highest levels of technology and digitization in the world. I also have to tell you as an anecdote that after the video I published about Lidl, an employee from the Shars group company's IT department, which has an office in Barcelona with computer scientists working there, wrote to me saying, "Hey, thank you very

much for giving visibility to the work we do within the company, that Lidl is not just supermarkets." The point is that the root of all this lies in supermarkets, and the news, the real hook, what I'm about to tell you that's truly shocking, is that this technological arm of the company has grown so large, along with others, that there's now a project to create a kind of cloud-based system capable of competing with the giants of Silicon Valley. And this is with Amazon's AWS, Microsoft's Asure, and Google's cloud. Not to be confused with the cloud, with Cloudo, which is Antropic's artificial intelligence, cloud of cloud, of what is in the cloud, which is what Google's system is called. How could a giant like this even consider such an investment? Well, it's very simple and very difficult at the same time. The point is that Swars is estimated to process more than 30 million transactions every single day, and that requires incredible computing, storage, and digital management capabilities. What did he do in the beginning? Well, directly subcontracting, of course, to the big American giants. What did he decide to do little by little? Start creating companies that, through the parent company, would solve the problems that the parent company has. That is to say, a business group like the Shars group, which also has two retail supermarket distribution chains, on the one hand there is Lidl and on the other hand there is Kautland. It also has the need for tremendous logistics, excellent production in terms of all its private label brands, its own warehouses, and the digital management of all this, and even compliance with recycling regulations for everything it produces, sells, and often does not sell or has to recover. Well, Swars' strategy over the years—saying this in a few minutes is very easy, but it's really a decades-long process—has been to create companies through the parent company that would take care of these key tasks. And this is the big difference between this company and many others. Whereas in the automotive industry or in phenomena such as, for example, Mercadona, what is sought are suppliers who work practically exclusively for you. This company also negotiates with suppliers, but it has its own factories for its private label products, for its milk, for its cocoa, for its chocolates, for the products that have the highest turnover and those where they believe they can have the greatest difference in margin. logistics. They also have their own logistics companies and, of course, all the critical information management they generate with all their references and all the transactions that are done in the stores daily, now depend on a new company that was founded in 2018 and is organized around the company Swarz Digits, a company that in 2025 already had a turnover of 2,200 million euros, which may seem like a very small or very large amount depending on how you look at it. Of course, it's small compared to these big monsters, but with investments and a very clear idea: to have a system that is completely independent in the European Union from everything that depends on the technology of the United States of America. And this is where things get serious, this is where things get interesting. Well, and speaking of all these European projects, by the way, you know that lately the European stock market has been clearly beating the growth of the United States stock market . We have excellent companies in Europe, and for example, we have the example in Spain of Zara, which I told you about in a previous video, of how it is resisting and how in the long term its valuation on the stock market has been increasing. Well, if you're investing and have exposure in an ETF that tracks typical US indices , like the S&P 500, you may not have considered that this exposure is heavily focused on that country and that you might be missing out on some of Europe's significant growth, which has outperformed the US in recent times, leading many high-capital specialists to focus on Europe. Well, and the European Union can be a very interesting place to invest because it is the region where we live, where we consume, where we get paid, where we have greater currency protection, which in this case is ours, the euro. And ultimately, rather than an investment recommendation, which we never make in the videos, perhaps you have a hole in your account or you haven't realized the potential of Europe and, for example, ETFs linked to Europe. Here in the video I'm going to show you some of them, and you'll also find some of them in the video description. For example, the Stocks Europe 600 is one of my favorites, but whatever the ETF, of course, none are infallible, none are perfect all the time. And a very interesting and very good way to reduce this uncertainty is precisely by making regular contributions, simply ignoring whether the time is good, regular, bad, or normal and letting compound interest work for you. Well, if you want to mitigate uncertainty with regular contributions, I do it through the new system offered by Freedom24. Here, you simply choose the ETF or ETFs in which you want to invest, and on the first day of each month, that amount will be automatically transferred from your account without any additional fees or commissions. This way, you'll have the peace of mind of knowing you're making regular purchases regardless of market fluctuations, always aiming for long-term growth. Unfortunately, the SAR group is not yet publicly traded, so you won't be able to invest in the company surrounding Lidl, but you can invest in the European trend towards the growth of our technologies and our market, which was very undervalued. If you want to make this type of recurring investment with ETFs, in the first comment and in the video description you have my link to Freedom 24, where you can already do it and with the Well promo they will also give you free shares directly, you know, in the video description and in the first comment.

In 2021, after this service was launched, Stackit, the name of the key service, cloud computing and storage, exactly the same services offered by the giants of Silicon Valley, began to be sold externally. And surprisingly, or not surprisingly, in Europe, especially in the Netherlands, large companies, the state itself, and its central bank began to move data to Lidl's cloud from the Suarzendo group of American cloud providers. For example, the Netherlands has both its government and central bank hosting their data on Stackit servers. Similarly, KPN, a technology company in the Netherlands, is also part of their cloud service if you prefer a more traditional approach. And then there are many agreements with the German government, as you would expect , or large information companies like SAP also use their servers. And now for the powerful, interesting part: an investment of no less than 11 billion euros is coming. 11 billion euros, which is the largest single investment that the Schartars group has ever made to start creating data centers across Europe. The figure being discussed is around half a dozen data centers. It is not yet very clear how many, but the idea is precisely to create this completely European ecosystem. And this is very interesting because, look at everything that's happening at a geopolitical and global level, that suddenly the United States of America or a capricious president, due to any geopolitical problem, not only decides to take away our power to press a button on a weapon that we have bought and that doesn't work, which is something that the United States of America already has the power to do, but also to block our internet connection, block our connection to the cloud or block our connection to artificial intelligence, as recently happened with Antropic and its Fable model. Well, obviously, the need for each and every one of the digital services we depend on in that country to have a counterpart at least within the European Union is becoming increasingly apparent, so that we can be completely independent of what may happen in the future. And that's precisely why this move by the owner of Lidl is so important, and that's also why so many people are taking it very seriously and supporting it. And this goes even further. They have created a center, let's say, for knowledge and technology development in Germany. very important in which they are not only developing the base of this server system, its technologies, but they also entered as investors within Alef Alfa, which would be something like the Open II of Europe. And herein lies one of the major problems. Can a country be completely independent with these technologies? Well, in this case ALF Alfa ended up being taken over and invested in by COE, which is an investment group from Canada, so we lost complete European control of an artificial intelligence system again. For now, we only have the French mistral left. The point is that, as you can see, there are movements within Germany, precisely because the United States of America is cracking down hard on Donald Trump's America on many fronts, and all the alarms are going off. So it is very striking and very interesting that for the first time a businessman, a private European company, is daring to go against this, is daring to take this step. And there are other European entrepreneurs who are also taking the step in VPN services, email services , and alternatives to Gmail. We'll talk about that in future videos. But ultimately, a European movement is beginning to emerge, one that is not yet comparable to the American movement, but which is precisely trying to create the ecosystem so that in the future we can be much more independent, which I personally find very gratifying and interesting.

And one last interesting fact: the circular economy goes so far in this business group that once they've sold you the products in their supermarket, it's incredible, but they also take care of recycling. They have a company called Presiro, which already has a turnover of more than 4 billion euros, mind you, more than double that of the technology company, which is now going to grow like crazy and is able to recycle more than 80% of the things it undertakes. All the bottles, for example, from Lidl end up being recycled into PET, the plastic that is 100% recyclable. Everything that is plastic from gardening or household products is also something that they recycle at a very high percentage. In other words, it's a very interesting company in the sense that it doesn't just focus on sales and product placement, but is also very focused and concentrated on doing business in all those business units that support a large structure like this one. Did you know all this about the owner of the Lidl group? Well, now you know.