The Big Five Tech Companies (Apple, Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft and Meta) Earned Over $1.4 Trillion Last Year, Here’s Where That Money Came From

The combined revenues for big tech companies, more specifically the Big Five that comprises of Meta, Alphabet, Apple, Microsoft and Amazon, crossed $1.4 trillion in 2021. That means that if these corporations formed a nation state, it would be the twelfth largest country in the world in terms of GDP, surpassing global economic powerhouses like Spain and Indonesia. That raises some interesting questions about how these companies earn their money and what they put this money into.

Amazon won out in the revenue department by bringing in just shy of $470 billion last year. 67% of this revenue came from America which should come as no surprise since it received over 40% of ecommerce sales in the region. 47.3% of its income came from the Amazon website itself, 22% came from third party services, 13.2% came from web hosting and the rest was split between ad revenue, Amazon Prime and some physical stores that Amazon owns.

With all of that having been said and now out of the way, it is important to note that Apple did very well for itself too. The company raked in over $365 billion in 2021 which is less than Amazon, but in spite of the fact that this is the case the company earned three times more net income. While Amazon only earned $33 billion in profit, for Apple this number was as high as $94 billion. Over 52.5% of this revenue came from iPhones, but the company is a bit more diversified geographically with American revenue only accounting for 42% of the total.

As for Alphabet, Google’s parent company, their revenue figures for 2021 showed $257.8 billion. $76 billion was net income, and the majority of this revenue, or 69% to be precise, came from ad services across various properties. Google dominates the search engine landscape, with over 86% of online searches being done through its search engine.

Microsoft came in fourth with just over $168 billion in 2021 revenue. Their net income was $61.3 billion, and they also have a much more diversified set of revenue streams than other companies. Their two major revenue generating products were Microsoft Azure and Office, which represented 31.3% and 23.7% respectively. Windows is also a big money earner for them, bringing in 13.8% of their revenues last year.

Coming in last is Facebook with a somewhat underwhelming $117 billion. The vast majority of their revenue, as much as 97.5%, came from advertising on Facebook and Instagram. This makes Facebook one of the least diversified companies out there which might explain its rapidly declining stock price although Facebook is still the dominant social media platform in terms of Monthly Active Users.


H/T: VC.

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