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by stbullard 4596 days ago
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
3 comments
notacoward 4596 days ago
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...

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chollida1 4596 days ago
> 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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notacoward 4596 days ago
No, it seems like the people manufacturing one thing are being rewarded more than the people manufacturing other things . . . until you realize it's not manufacturing at all. It's resource extraction, which is necessary but still a different thing. Also, why overlook the banks? They might not be totally without value, but they're not manufacturing either. I'd much rather see such a list dominated by people who actually build stuff higher up the value chain, not their suppliers and facilitators.
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carlob 4596 days ago
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 4596 days ago
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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crntaylor 4596 days ago
Bar graph, for ease of comparison:

http://imgur.com/J21Oi7Z

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tonylemesmer 4596 days ago
a much nicer way of looking at simple data!
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vilius 4596 days ago
Notice the impact different presentation makes here. If I'd come to a summary like this, I'd notice some standings, compare few companies and continue with what I was doing. While the info-graph provided a completely different experience. I was staring at the data, comparing with my own income, comparing to cars and houses, thinking about the profit difference between FB and Google and what it will take FB to get somewhere close. The data is the same, but data with design applied gets me interested and I spend time investigating it.
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