Apple Worth More Than Alphabet and Amazon Combined

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Jun 30, 9:30AM EDT

Follow 24/7 Wall St. on Google

This post may contain links from our sponsors and affiliates, and Flywheel Publishing may receive compensation for actions taken through them.

Apple Worth More Than Alphabet and Amazon Combined — © Eric Thayer / Getty Images News via Getty Images

There are dozens of headlines recently about the fact that Apple could be the first company to have a $3 trillion market cap. These miss the point. What is more telling is how Apple’s market cap relates to those other public companies with market caps over $1 trillion. (These companies have the best reputations.)
[in-text-ad]
Apple’s current market cap is $2.98 trillion. The third largest company based on a market cap is Alphabet, owner of Google and YouTube, at $1.52 trillion. In fourth place, Amazon has a market cap of $1.31 trillion.

Why is Apple’s market cap so much higher? It has better prospects.
[nativounit]
Apple remains largely a hardware company that commands ridiculous demand, particularly for its iPhone. Every year, Apple releases a new version of the iPhone. Every year, it sells tens of millions of these. Miraculously, this trend has not shown any fatigue, nor is it expected to. Apple boosts its Mac and smartwatch hardware sales well. It also has a highly profitable software and services business. However, none of these drive its strength on either a brand or revenue basis.
[wallst_email_signup]
Alphabet has a challenge that will remain while the economy is weak. It is an advertising company. Ad rates weaken as consumer spending gets threatened. That is the case today and could be for another year. Beyond Google and YouTube, Alphabet has no other large source of revenue.
[recirclink id=1255873]
Amazon is currently a wreck. Its huge e-commerce business barely makes money. It has overbuilt its infrastructure and product lines and started cutting those back. However, the efforts are painful, financially and in terms of personnel. Amazon’s successful unit is its cloud-driven Amazon Web Services. But AWS is not large enough to entirely make up for the trouble in Amazon’s original business.

Apple’s market cap is much higher than other $1 trillion companies because it has a better business model.

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.