It is time to come up with something, but until now I only determined which companies to visualise: four oil majors, four manufacturers and four tech giants. Apple is a manufacturer, but because of its history we will consider it to be a tech giant. Samsung as a manufacturer delivers components to Apple and brings its own phones to the market at the same time, so the line between manufacturing and tech giant is a bit blurry.
Photo by by lalabell68 on Pixabay
Thinking about the order of the companies and the periods to present (2019, 2018, 2017 won’t be fun at all), I made a mistake. To be sure that all numbers are available right now, I decided to take 2018, 2013 and 2008. Ten years ago the world was very different and we might expect some interesting changes during a decade. Therefore I thought it would be nice to take the original sizes (in revenue) for all twelve companies in 2008. After a couple of search actions, some reading and calculating I realised that this was not the way to go. The plan was to add one a company at a time and preparing datasets for three years is doable. However, collecting one year for all companies upfront would not contribute to the story any time soon.
Last time, when selecting the interesting set of companies, I already added the revenues in billions of USD. It would be easier to just sort the list and present it right here! Perhaps the values are not completely reliable, but we will correct this later and change the order in the graph if needed. Long story short – the list with the most recently known revenues is this one:
Exxon Mobile 405 bln. USD
Royal Dutch Shell 356 bln. USD
Volkswagen 278 bln. USD
BP 274 bln. USD
Toyota 272 bln. USD
Apple 266 bln. USD
Amazon 233 bln. USD
Samsung Electronics 222 USD
Chevron 205 bln USD.
Alphabet 137 bln. USD
Microsoft 110 bln. USD
Facebook 56 bln. USD
Interesting to see that Apple reported a revenue (sales) of only 32.5 bln. USD in 2008. Ten years later it is over eight times as large. On the other hand Exxon Mobil – still the largest with 405 bln. USD of revenue – reported 477 bln. USD of total revenue in 2008 – only 80% of the original amount. At the stock exchange Apple already took over the leading position, but that’s also based on expectations about the future of course. Looking at revenue, the oil majors are still at the top. For how long? Is data really the new oil or will the tech giants meet their own climate problem in cyberspace? There it will probably not be CO2 (although data centres emit a lot of it as a part of their energy is coming from fossil fuels), but privacy, manipulation and ethics being the challenge. Let’s see how their financial position developed during the last decade in the next posts. At least now it is clear that Exxon Mobile will be the first one.
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