As Year Ends, Alphabet Reigns as Second Most Valuable Company

By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Jan 12, 5:08AM EST · Published Dec 25, 7:49AM EST

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Almost all the coverage of company market capitalization recently is about Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL) which has come close to $900 billion. Almost none has focused on the next company, Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOGL), the owner of Google, YouTube, and a handful of other business. Its market cap is $716 billion, well above the tier of companies below it, based on the same measure.

Like Apple, Alphabet is not a one product operation. While Google dominates the search market, at least among Western countries, YouTube is the largest video site in the world. It also owns Waymo, the autonomous car company, and Google fiber, a play at broadband distribution. One concern investors have, however, is that none of these businesses even approach Google in terms of revenue. Alphabet’s earnings announcements are dominated by information about Google search’s paid click level and cost per click, two essential metrics of the health of the search business.

Alphabet’s revenue will crack the $100 billion revenue level this year. Through the first nine months which ended September 30, revenue reached $78.5 billion. In the third quarter, it was $27.8 billion. That means it could pass JPMorgan Chase & Co. (NYSE: JPM) on the Fortune 500 list of companies by revenue. That should put it 20th on the list. It might pass Chevron Corp. (NYSE: CVX) for the 18th spot as well.

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Alphabet is unlikely to be caught in market cap by any of the companies just below it. Microsoft Corp.’s (NASDAQ: MSFT) market cap is $641 billion, which puts it in third place. Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) is fourth at $531 billion. Facebook Inc. (NASDAQ: FB) is in fifth place at $523 billion.

Many experts predict that Apple’s market cap will rise about $1 trillion in 2018 which would make it the first company in history to do so. Just as likely, probably, is the Alphabet will move above $800 billion, if the overall markets continue to rise at current paces.

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.