Technology

Chart: Here’s How 5 Tech Giants Make Their Billions

Published

7 years ago

May 12, 2017

Jeff Desjardins

Chart: How 5 Tech Giants Make Their Billions

The Revenue Streams of the Five Largest Tech Companies

The Chart of the Week is a weekly Visual Capitalist feature on Fridays.

Last year, we published a chart showing that tech companies have displaced traditional blue chip companies like Exxon Mobil and Walmart as the most valuable companies in the world.

Here are the latest market valuations for those same five companies:

Rank	Company	Market Cap (Billions, as of May 11, 2017)	Primary Revenue Driver
#1	Apple	$804	Hardware
#2	Alphabet	$651	Advertising
#3	Microsoft	$536	Software
#4	Amazon	$455	Online Retail
#5	Facebook	$434	Advertising
	TOTAL	$2,880

Together, they are worth $2.9 trillion in market capitalization – and they combined in FY2016 for revenues of $555 billion with a $94 billion bottom line.

Bringing Home the Bacon?

Despite all being at the top of the stock market food chain, the companies are at very different stages.

In 2016, Apple experienced its first annual revenue decline since 2001, but the company brought home a profit equal to that of all other four companies combined.

On the other hand, Amazon is becoming a revenue machine with very little margin, while Facebook generates 5x more profit despite far smaller top line numbers.

Company	2016 Revenue (Billions)	2016 Net Income (Billions)	Margin
Apple	$216	$46	21%
Alphabet	$90	$19	21%
Microsoft	$85	$17	20%
Amazon	$136	$2	2%
Facebook	$28	$10	36%

How They Make Their Billions

Each of these companies is pretty unique in how they generate revenue, though there is some overlap:

Facebook and Alphabet each make the vast majority of their revenues from advertising (97% and 88%, respectively)
Apple makes 63% of their revenue from the iPhone, and another 21% coming from the iPad and Mac lines
Amazon makes 90% from its “Product” and “Media” categories, and 9% from AWS
Microsoft is diverse: Office (28%), servers (22%), Xbox (11%), Windows (9%), ads (7%), Surface (5%), and other (18%)

Lastly, for fun, what if we added all these companies’ revenues together, and categorized them by source?

Category	2016 Revenue (Millions)	% Total	Description
Hardware	$197,020	36%	iPhone, iPad, Mac, Xbox, Surface
Online Retail	$122,205	22%	Amazon (Product and Media Categories)
Advertising	$112,366	20%	Google, Facebook, YouTube, Bing ads
Software	$31,692	6%	Office, Windows
Cloud/Server	$31,396	6%	AWS, Microsoft Server, Azure
Other	$60,177	11%	Consulting, other services (iTunes, Google Play), etc.
	$554,856	100%

Note: this isn’t perfect. As an example, Amazon’s fast-growing advertising business gets lumped into their “Other” category.

Hardware, e-commerce, and and advertising make up 76% of all revenues.

Meanwhile, software isn’t the cash cow it used to be, but it does help serve as a means to an end for some companies. For example, Android doesn’t generate any revenue directly, but it does allow more users to buy apps in the Play Store and to search Google via their mobile devices. Likewise, Apple bundles in operating systems with each hardware purchase.

Related Topics:apple google facebook tech amazon alphabet advertising revenues

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Technology

Ranked: Semiconductor Companies by Industry Revenue Share

Nvidia is coming for Intel’s crown. Samsung is losing ground. AI is transforming the space. We break down revenue for semiconductor companies.

Published

1 week ago

April 9, 2024

Pallavi Rao

A cropped pie chart showing the biggest semiconductor companies by the percentage share of the industry’s revenues in 2023.

Semiconductor Companies by Industry Revenue Share

This was originally posted on our Voronoi app. Download the app for free on Apple or Android and discover incredible data-driven charts from a variety of trusted sources.

Did you know that some computer chips are now retailing for the price of a new BMW?

As computers invade nearly every sphere of life, so too have the chips that power them, raising the revenues of the businesses dedicated to designing them.

But how did various chipmakers measure against each other last year?

We rank the biggest semiconductor companies by their percentage share of the industry’s revenues in 2023, using data from Omdia research.

Which Chip Company Made the Most Money in 2023?

Market leader and industry-defining veteran Intel still holds the crown for the most revenue in the sector, crossing $50 billion in 2023, or 10% of the broader industry’s topline.

All is not well at Intel, however, with the company’s stock price down over 20% year-to-date after it revealed billion-dollar losses in its foundry business.

Rank	Company	2023 Revenue	% of Industry Revenue
1	Intel	$51B	9.4%
2	NVIDIA	$49B	9.0%
3	Samsung Electronics	$44B	8.1%
4	Qualcomm	$31B	5.7%
5	Broadcom	$28B	5.2%
6	SK Hynix	$24B	4.4%
7	AMD	$22B	4.1%
8	Apple	$19B	3.4%
9	Infineon Tech	$17B	3.2%
10	STMicroelectronics	$17B	3.2%
11	Texas Instruments	$17B	3.1%
12	Micron Technology	$16B	2.9%
13	MediaTek	$14B	2.6%
14	NXP	$13B	2.4%
15	Analog Devices	$12B	2.2%
16	Renesas Electronics Corporation	$11B	1.9%
17	Sony Semiconductor Solutions Corporation	$10B	1.9%
18	Microchip Technology	$8B	1.5%
19	Onsemi	$8B	1.4%
20	KIOXIA Corporation	$7B	1.3%
N/A	Others	$126B	23.2%
N/A	Total	$545B	100%

Note: Figures are rounded. Totals and percentages may not sum to 100.

Meanwhile, Nvidia is very close to overtaking Intel, after declaring $49 billion of topline revenue for 2023. This is more than double its 2022 revenue ($21 billion), increasing its share of industry revenues to 9%.

Nvidia’s meteoric rise has gotten a huge thumbs-up from investors. It became a trillion dollar stock last year, and broke the single-day gain record for market capitalization this year.

Other chipmakers haven’t been as successful. Out of the top 20 semiconductor companies by revenue, 12 did not match their 2022 revenues, including big names like Intel, Samsung, and AMD.

The Many Different Types of Chipmakers

All of these companies may belong to the same industry, but they don’t focus on the same niche.

According to Investopedia, there are four major types of chips, depending on their functionality: microprocessors, memory chips, standard chips, and complex systems on a chip.

Nvidia’s core business was once GPUs for computers (graphics processing units), but in recent years this has drastically shifted towards microprocessors for analytics and AI.

These specialized chips seem to be where the majority of growth is occurring within the sector. For example, companies that are largely in the memory segment—Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron Technology—saw peak revenues in the mid-2010s.