
How much revenue top companies earn per second - pjvds
http://www.happier.co.uk/infogram/amount-top-companies-earn-per-second.html
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stbullard
Summary (note: revenue, not profit) Blackberry: 205 Facebook: 230 Nokia: 941
Oracle: 1068 Cisco: 1594 Intel: 1628 Dell: 1865 Google: 1873 Amazon: 1996
Microsoft: 2331 IBM: 3166 HP: 3459 Foxconn: 3815 Apple: 4540 Samsung: 6486

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notacoward
Just for fun, here are the profit numbers.

Gazprom 1410

Exxon Mobil 1302

I&C Bank of China 1021

Shell 980

Chevron 852

China Constr. Bank 830

Apple 822

BP 814

BHP Billiton 749

Microsoft 734

Two banks, two high tech, the rest oil/gas/mining. Kind of depressing. List
and figures from

[http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/global500/2012/perfor...](http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/global500/2012/performers/companies/profits/)

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chollida1
> Two banks, two high tech, the rest oil/gas/mining. Kind of depressing.

Why is this depressing?

It looks like the people manufacturing things for the economy are being
rewarded. To me this seems like the economy is working properly.

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carlob
Oil/gas/mining don't exactly leave the world a better place. Banks one could
argue for both sides, though I tend to lean on bad too.

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elliptic
Ehhh. Those companies and others like them (Aramco, etc) represent the heart
of the modern industrial economy, for better or for worse. Are consumer
companies like Apple even imaginable in their absence?

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nraynaud
It's a bit too bad they compare revenue of resellers like Amazon with editors
like Microsoft, the gross margin is really different. Resellers have to punch
over their weight to get some money home where Microsoft brings almost
everything to the bank.

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tixocloud
Yes, I agree but it's really very difficult to compare companies these days.
On the surface, Microsoft, Apple and Google all seem like competitors to each
other but they have different businesses underneath and as you said, different
gross margins. However, I don't think you can truly find businesses that are
almost identical when it comes to giant conglomerates.

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rayiner
The interesting thing about this chart is how unprofitable manufacturing is.
Foxconn's profits are less than $3 billion on $115 billion in revenues (and
$50-$60 billion in assets). Google has 3x the profit but less than half the
revenue. When people ask why manufacturing has left the U.S., this is the
reason why: it doesn't offer very good return on capital.

On the other hand, Foxconn provides jobs for over 1.2 million people, while
Google employs less than 50,000. Also relevant to the debate about
manufacturing.

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yetanotherphd
Profits relative to revenues isn't a useful figure. An investor who sees a
business as a black box where you put initial capital in and get money out,
doesn't care what the revenue of the company is at all.

Jobs are a more complex issue - offshoring manufacturing may be efficient, but
it does have an impact on the distribution of wealth, and unemployment. It's
not clear what the right policy trade off is. I think cutting back on illegal
immigration would be a better way to boost job growth in the low end of the
job market.

~~~
euroclydon
> Profits relative to revenues isn't a useful figure. An investor who sees a
> business as a black box where you put initial capital in and get money out,
> doesn't care what the revenue of the company is at all.

I can't see how an investor would not care. It seems that given a more
profitable business, for a desired ROI amount, the capital input is smaller.

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mediaman
Many manufacturing companies can run on much higher debt levels, because much
of the debt is collateralized by resellable equipment (good for the bankers)
and because their revenues tend to have lower variance (good for the
shareholders).

This magnifies returns on equity, which makes them more competitive with non-
manufacturing companies, which typically cannot run on as high of debt levels
because they don't have the same kind of collateral.

So typically you probably do have lower returns on invested capital (the
entire capital base, debt plus equity) but returns on equity might be
comparable. And if the manufacturing business is more stable -- which it often
is, compared to most more ephemeral businesses with few assets -- lower
returns are acceptable because there is lower risk.

Of course not all manufacturing companies are lower risk than all non-
manufacturing companies.

~~~
euroclydon
That's interesting. Do businesses which can run on higher debt levels
consequentially provide fewer opportunities for investment?

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MattBearman
Interesting to see, and well presented. I'd be more interested in profit
rather than revenue.

~~~
LordIllidan
Interesting, but I didn't care much for the visualizations shown - they took
up way too much space on the page for the bigger companies.

~~~
_mulder_
Agreed. I know it's trendy to show data in this method, but it's impossible to
compare like-for-like. One ends up just looking at the numerical value.

A simple bar graph would have been much better.

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z92
Displaying profit instead of revenue would have been more interesting,
"Waooo!!! This company makes more money per second than what I make working a
whole month!"

~~~
jalada
The problem is profit is too closely tied to accounting, and doesn't
correspond to success or size.

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adamnemecek
Well the order was somewhat unexpected. Surprised about IBM, HP and Dell.

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nostrademons
IBM and HP are absolutely huge B2B service providers. HP has over 300,000
employees; IBM has over 400,000. By comparison, Google is an order of
magnitude less, at about 35,000 excluding Motorola.

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nraynaud
to add a precision to your post: and most IBM and HP's employees are billed by
the time. Headcount is proportional to market size.

Google employee's time brings no revenue per se. Headcount is independent of
market size (the only limiting thing is customer support whose max is
O(log(customer)), and we are talking about google ...)

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statusgraph
Why is customer supporter log(n)? Seems it would be nlog(n) (because of
management overhead)

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nraynaud
community support + services companies when you're big enough.

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sidcool
I was a bit surprised to see FoxConn there with such a big revenue.

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essersteven
everything is from foxconn these days...

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swalsh
Revenue is not really interesting. Take Amazon as an example, they make a lot
of revenue... but that's because they pretty much give away as much money as
they can sustain.

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rheide
Would be cool if this had an at-a-glance view with incrementing counters for
each company on a single screen, updating proportionally to their revenue.

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ekianjo
Too bad they only presented tech companies. It would be interested to compare
Apple vs Shell or BP, just to get an idea of the differences.

~~~
cdavid
I would add compare it with energy-related industries _private or public_.
Each of Shell, Exxon, Sinopec and China national petroleum earn 3 times as
much as Apple. 6/10 biggest companies by income are in oil/gas, and privately
owned companies are a fraction of the industry size...

~~~
ekianjo
I wouldn't say _private_ since these are corporations usually based on shares
systems. This is different from a company such as Valve, for example, which is
purely private and where the revenue information is not publicly available.

Apart from this detail, your point is very interesting. I wonder, all
industries considered, how much % of worldwide's revenue is earned by
nationally owned companies versus the corporations counterparts.

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cdavid
Thanks for the correction, my wording was a bad translation from my native
language.

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rplnt
The title is missing an important keyword. There are, of course, a lot of
companies making much (much) more than this per seconds.

Also, how is Foxconn a technology company in the sense the others are? Don't
they only (as oppsoed to Samsung for example which does that _also_ )
manufacture for others, what is designed by others? I really don't think they
fit the description.

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jlarocco
Yeah, for comparison purposes Walmart is about $14871 and Exxon around $14364.

Using the numbers from
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_companies_by_revenue](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_companies_by_revenue)

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flexie
Maybe at some point in the future you can actually see real time what
companies sell and buy and with whom the transactions are made.

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mswe
You can see it today if they make the data available.. nothing much in terms
of technology here.

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gdilla
Love this! It'd be neat if you could enter a stock ticker for any company and
see it displayed here.

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ohadron
Make means income or revenue?

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adamnemecek
Revenue, it says so at the top.

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fusionflo
I was expecting to see the big GOOGLE on this list but could not see it?

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bouk
It's there: [http://www.happier.co.uk/infogram/amount-top-companies-
earn-...](http://www.happier.co.uk/infogram/amount-top-companies-earn-per-
second.html#google)

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known
I propose these companies should adopt/donate/fund ObamaCare

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itsbits
would have liked to visualize with Bar graph rather long page...

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radious
Somehow this page misses twitter...

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JetSpiegel
They run out of space for all those 0s

