[xnull2guest]

Companies lose huge amounts of money, much of it from PR with customers, when they are hacked. The recent EBay hack for example lost the company huge amounts of money (remember seeing but haven't had luck finding the numbers online).

But you're only thinking about customer retailers.

Many companies need to keep their intellectual property, source code, designs and trade secrets safe from hackers and competitors. Intel is a great example of a company that dominates an industry purely due to IP. Chinese companies (and government) sponsored hackers would love to utilize 12 nm transistor technology to outcompete Intel. I can't help but to wonder what Intel microcode update keys would sell for.

Brazilian PETROBRAS lost billions of dollars when they got hacked by the NSA and as a result lost offshore oil drill location auctions.

There's also 'outsider trading'. Intimate knowledge of what financial decisions companies and states are going to make is big money (http://tinyurl.com/l834xou).

Finally, there's stealing money directly from corporate accounts (Axis Bank). A recent example are the thefts of large numbers of bitcoins from bitcoin trading companies. Often hackers abuse automated clearing house systems to transfer data between accounts and siphon small quantities across large swaths of time/transactions (http://www.bankinfosecurity.com/ach-fraud-payroll-hack-drain...).

Then there's political hacking. The Chinese government stole Israel's Iron Dome defense system specifications. What does that 'cost'? It's hard to calculate. There are countless examples where state actors steal designs from defense contracting companies.