Have you ever wondered how much money the really big tech companies are making?
We have, so we looked at the money earned by 15 large, well-known tech companies to find out: Adobe, Amazon, Apple, Baidu, Cisco, Dell, eBay, Google, HP, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Oracle, Sun and Yahoo.
To get some perspective, we looked at three things:
- Revenue
- Profit (net income)
- Assets
And because we couldn’t help but make this a bit of a competition, we picked a “winner” in each category. So, who will it be?
Highest revenue
How much money are these companies pulling in? Here is the revenue for these 15 tech companies during 2008.
As you can see, HP and IBM are in a league of their own here, distantly followed by Dell and Microsoft. We were quite surprised that Intel wasn’t higher on this list.
Winner: HP
(And boy would it be nice to have Pingdom on this list. When you start counting your revenue in billions, you know you’re BIG. Not that we’re complaining, but still… billions… 🙂 )
Highest profit
While having a huge revenue is great, profit is what really counts in the long term.
Profit, or net income, is the money that’s left after subtracting costs and expenses from the total revenue. Here is the profit of these companies during 2008.
Note how different this list is from the revenue one, especially for one company: Microsoft. It has by far the highest profit of these companies.
Winner: Microsoft
Most assets
The total assets shown here include everything of value owned by these companies.
Just as with revenue, HP and IBM are in a league of their own here. Microsoft and Cisco are distant seconds.
Winner: HP
Final words
We’re not saying that this is a complete view of the financial situation of these companies (we’re definitely not accountants or financial analysts) but it’s still interesting to compare these numbers to get a feel for the kind of money that big tech companies are pushing around.
It also gives perspective. For example, judging by these numbers, Google is still a relatively small player when compared to veterans like IBM and even Microsoft. Of course, Google is 10 years old and IBM is over 100 years old, so the comparison isn’t exactly fair… 🙂
You might also want to check out our follow-up post about how many employees these companies have.
Data source: Google Finance
All the companies we included in this survey are publicly traded on NYSE/NASDAQ. Although Sun was recently bought by Oracle, we included it anyway.
