![]() ![]() Unlike Black Friday when users shop for presents for others for the holiday season, Prime Day is more likely to be a hedonistic indulgence. Analysts anticipated this to be the biggest shopping day of the year to date. For those unfamiliar with it, Prime Day is an occasion for Amazon Prime members to take advantage of thousands of exclusive deals. That's a stunning amount of power to entrust to a handful of companies run by a handful of men.Prime Day boosted the already-phenomenal usage metrics of Amazon’s mobile appĪmazon held its second Prime Day on Tuesday, July 12, 2016. Our thought bubble: The big four companies shape people's lives - what goods they can obtain, what media they're exposed to, how they connect with friends and family, how they understand the world. Amazon doesn't publicly state how many people have accounts, but CEO Jeff Bezos did reveal in 2018 that the company had passed 100 million Prime customers in the U.S.By the end of last year, Apple had 1.5 billion devices in active use by people around the world.Facebook had 2.6 billion monthly active users as of Q1 this year.The company's YouTube notched 2 billion monthly active users last year. Google crossed the 2 billion user mark for its G Suite of products (which includes Gmail along with productivity apps like Google Docs) earlier this year.And Apple's high-end devices are out of reach for billions of people.ĭespite those limits, these companies are operating at a scale that no previous industry has achieved. Amazon only operates its core e-commerce platform in certain countries (and has stumbled in efforts to crack into some key markets, including China). Facebook and Google aren't in China, home to the largest population of internet users in the world. The world isn't all open to them, of course.Their scale is limited only by how many people they can reach. These companies all aim to connect anyone who can get online to goods, services and other people. Those fat cash hoards give them flexibility to make ambitious internal investments, freedom to buy up potential competitors, the option to juice shareholder value through stock buybacks, and cushioning to weather crises.Ĥ.6 billion: Human beings on earth who are connected to the internet (according to one recent estimate). $420 billion: the combined total cash pile of the four firms (per data from FactSet, when they last reported earnings). Together, revenue for all four add up to roughly the GDP of Saudi Arabia. ![]() Amazon: $280.5 billion, around Pakistan's GDP.Apple: $260.2 billion, close to Vietnam's GDP.Alphabet: $161.9 billion, a bit north of Ukraine's GDP.Facebook: $70.7 billion, in the same ballpark as Venezuela's gross domestic product.$773 billion: the four companies' combined annual revenue at last count.īroken out by company, they made the following in fiscal 2019 (also calendar 2019 for all but Apple, whose fiscal year starts with the fourth calendar quarter): Even as the market and its most valuable firms have risen dramatically in value, the big four have risen more. Five years ago, the other six companies in the top 10 were worth about 90% of the combined market cap of the big four.(The other one, which is also often considered a member of the Big Tech club, is Microsoft.) But for the time being, they constitute four of the top five most valuable American companies to trade on public markets.Apple, with its premium consumer devices, and Google and Facebook, who depend on ad revenue, could be vulnerable to a long-lasting pandemic-driven downturn. That number changes by the day, of course.$5 trillion: The four companies' (rough) combined market capitalization. The four Big Tech CEOs who will testify before Congress Wednesday command global empires with power and wealth that make them more like countries than companies.īy the numbers: Here are four very large stats for Facebook, Apple, Google/Alphabet and Amazon that tell the story of their value, scale and influence.
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