THE LARGEST COMPANY IN THE WORLD

I was reading the latest TIME of the 100 most influential companies and saw a note that Tesla's market cap was around $700 billion, while General Motors was under $100 billion. Turns out that today this figure for Tesla is $567 billion, even though General Motors sold 6.8 million cars in 2020 while Tesla only sold half a million. Part of this market cap value is the stock value of the company, and GE sold 8.5 million vehicles in 2018. You got to wonder if Tesla is monstrously overvalued. If you were wondering why Reese Witherspoon was on the cover, her company has been really influential.

Later, I saw that one with even fewer assets, Facebook, had a market cap of $890 billion. What is market cap? Simply, multiply the total number of outstanding shares by the current market price. Has nothing to do with what they are really worth.

Then, I saw that Tencent, a Chinese company, is the most valuable company in Asia with a worth of $750 billion. However, worth is different from cap. Market value uses numerous metrics such as price-to-earnings, price-to-sales and return-on-equity. Other factors such as outstanding bonds, long-term growth potential, corporate debt, taxes and interest payments are cranked into the worth.

Of course there is a third term again different from the other two: book value. Calculate by subtracting non-monetary assets and liabilities or debts from a company's total assets.

So I went to Statista, and saw the following ranked by market capitalization in 2020:

#1 $1645 billion Saudi Aramco (Saudi Arabia)
#2 $1359 billion Microsoft (USA)
#3 $1286 billion Apple (USA)
#4 $1233 billion Amazon (USA)
#5 $ 919 billion Alphabet (USA--parent company of Google)
#6 $ 584 billion Facebook (USA)
#7 $ 545 billion Alibaba (China)
#8 $ 510 billion Tencent (China)
#9 $ 455 billion Berkshire Hathaway (USA, Warren Buffet)
#10 $ 395 billion Johnson & Johnson (USA, one of those vaccine companies)

Well, what about the largest by annual revenues (with market cap shown in parentheses)?

#1 $542 billion Walmart ($393 billion)
#2 $356 billion China Petroleum & Chemical Corp ($54 billion)
#3 $322 billion Amazon ($1.6 trillion)
#4 $320 billion PetroChina ($59 billion)
#5 $274 billion Apple ($2 trillion)
#6 $264 billion CVS ($77 billion)
#7 $263 billion Royal Dutch Shell ($110 billion)
#8 $260 billion Berkshire Hathaway($520 billion)
#9 $249 billion Toyota Motor Corp ($182.7 billion)
#10 $247 billion Volkswagen ($95 billion)

Why are the market caps different? Depends on the value of the stock. Today, for example, here are the largest by market cap:

#1 $2.1 trillion Apple
#2 $1.9 trillion Saudi Aramco
#3 $1.8 trillion Microsoft
#10 $0.5 trillion Tesla
#15 $0.4 trillion Johnson&Johnson
#16 $0.4 trillion Walmart
#31 $0.3 trillion Exxon Mobil
#40 $0.2 trillion Toyota
100 $0.1 trillion SoftBank

So which is the largest in the world? It depends.

Finally, Forbes this week had an article on how the world's biggest companies endured the pandemic. First, amazingly enough, the world stock market has JUMPED 48% in the past year. They list 100 companies by country, sales, profit, assets and market value. They had the following ranking:

#1 Industrial and Commercial Bank of China
#2 JPMorgan Chase
#3 Berkshire Hathaway
#4 China Construction Bank
#5 Saudi Aramco
#6 Apple
#6 Bank of America
#6 Ping An Insurance
#9 Agriculture Bank of China
#10 Amazon

In terms of parameters:

ICBC at #1 had the most assets = $4.9 trillion
Walmart at #18 had the largest sales figure = $556 billion
Apple at #6 had the biggest profit = $64 billion
Apple at #6 had the highest market value = $2.2 trillion

Tesla is not in the top 100, while General Motors is #47 with:

Sales = $123 billion
Profit =$6.4 billion
Assets =$235 billion
Market value = $84.6 billion

Here is a tribute to policemen by Paul Harvey, who passed away more than a decade ago:

Quizas (Perhaps) with Andrea Bocelli and Jeniffer Lopez. The original in 1947 was by Bobby Capo. I best remember the version by Nat King Cole.

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