But telecoms firms reckon it is better to cannibalise revenues than to lose a customer altogether.
The growth of the multiplex is also beginning to cannibalise other sections of the market.
It may cannibalise its core business but at least it will keep its customers.
The standard worry among Western firms is that this strategy will cannibalise the existing market for expensive technology.
Another worry is that the new non-fizzy drinks will cannibalise the fizzy ones.
It is owned by its members, many of whom would have to vote to cannibalise themselves out of a job.
So far, traditional full-service brokers have resisted using the Internet in any way that would cannibalise their existing offline brokerage business.
Online stores add to rather than cannibalise physical stores, hence they tend to bring in additional sales, according to industry observers.
The truth is that the bank's bosses worry that the untried debit card might cannibalise some of its highly profitable credit-card business.
The problem with creating new business models for the internet and a digital environment is that these can cannibalise existing, more lucrative businesses.
They found a "heinous plot to kidnap, rape, murder and cannibalise a number of very real women", assistant US attorney Randall Jackson told the court.
It takes a Henry Ford to go ahead and cannibalise a high margin business but that democratizing innovation impulse is exactly what is now reshaping the world.
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Cynics suspect that this may be less a consequence of its concern for family values than of initial fears, fading now, that online betting would cannibalise the offline business.
Meanwhile, the telephone network is usually in the hands of a state-owned (or formerly state-owned) monopoly that is reluctant to cannibalise corporate high-speed Internet access revenues by offering cheaper broadband.
Most appear resigned to the gradual loss of high-margin switched-call revenues and are gambling that it is better to cannibalise your own revenues than to watch others do it for you.
This means that secondhand ebooks would be very likely to cannibalise sales of new ebooks, and probably to a greater extent than piracy because it will be legal, easy and entirely without emotional repercussion.
Similarly, his programme for fairness in taxation would replace the council tax with a local income tax - that is already the next policy many Lib Dems fear Tony Blair is going to cannibalise.
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And although all fruit flies he studied would cannibalise one another to some degree, the flies he and his team reared - even generations after their relatives were food deprived - had a "greater propensity to cannibalise".
There were big dangers for the company in pricing the iPad mini - make it too cheap and it could cannibalise the lucrative sales of its big brother, too expensive and it could flop against the competition from Google and Amazon.
Such ties have usually hobbled low-cost airlines elsewhere: incumbents hate to cannibalise their own business. (Australia, where Qantas owns Jetstar, is an exception.) Analysts say the upstarts will thrive only if ANA and JAL step out of their way, letting them shake up the domestic tourist market.
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