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Visualizing the World’s Largest Airline Companies

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Through most of its history, the commercial airline industry has had a somewhat turbulent relationship with investors.

For example, during the span of 2003-2011, the three major U.S. carriers (American, United, and Delta) all filed for bankruptcy, and this was subsequently after merging with other large airlines (US Airways, Continental, and Northwest) that each had their own solvency issues.

Despite the rough ride a decade ago, just last year the industry raked in $35.6 billion in profits – a record-setting amount according to the International Air Transport Association (IATA). Even legendary investor Warren Buffett is flying high on airline stocks at the moment, and he’s recently floated the idea of buying a whole carrier for Berkshire’s portfolio.

Comparing Airlines

Today’s graphic comes from Reddit user /u/takeasecond and it uses data from the Forbes Global 2000 list to plot the world’s largest publicly-traded airlines in terms of revenue, profit, assets, and market value.

It provides some interesting insights on the industry, showing some unexpected carriers leading the way.

Visualizing the World's Largest Airline Companies

There are four companies that stand out instantly on the chart. Air France-KLM and Cathay Pacific are both easy to spot, but for the wrong reasons. They are to the left of the $0 profit line, and Forbes has their most recent net incomes listed as -$309 million and -$162 million respectively.

In the upper right corner, Delta Air Lines appears to be one of the healthiest companies by many measures. It ranks second in sales ($42B) and profitability ($3.5B), and comes out on top in terms of assets ($54B) and market value ($37B).

Finally, to the bottom right is Southwest Airlines – it has the highest profitability ($3.6B) but is able to do it at far higher margins than the rest of the pack.

Ranking Profitability and Sales

Here are two of the most important metrics – revenue and profit – for the 10 publicly-traded airlines with the most sales:

RankAirlineRevenue ($B)Profit ($B)Margin
#1American Airlines$43.0$1.94.4%
#2Delta Air Lines$42.1$3.58.3%
#3Deutsche Lufthansa$41.5$2.86.7%
#4United Continental$38.3$2.25.7%
#5Air France-KLM$29.1-$0.3-1.1%
#6International Airlines$26.0$2.38.8%
#7Southwest$21.2$3.617.0%
#8China Southern$19.7$1.05.1%
#9All Nippon$17.8$1.37.3%
#10China Eastern$15.7$0.85.3%

Note: Margin is calculated based on Forbes’ numbers above

In recent months, the IATA has revised its outlook for 2018 after originally forecasting record-setting airline revenues again.

The organization now sees profits falling to $33.8 billion, a 12% decrease on its original forecast.

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Markets

Will Tesla Lose Its Spot in the Magnificent Seven?

We visualize the recent performance of the Magnificent Seven stocks, uncovering a clear divergence between the group’s top and bottom names.

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Will Tesla Lose Its Spot in the Magnificent Seven?

This was originally posted on our Voronoi app. Download the app for free on iOS or Android and discover incredible data-driven charts from a variety of trusted sources.

In this graphic, we visualize the year-to-date (YTD) performance of the “Magnificent Seven”, a leading group of U.S. tech stocks that gained prominence in 2023 as the replacement of FAANG stocks.

All figures are as of March 12, 2024, and are listed in the table below.

RankCompanyYTD Change (%)
1Nvidia90.8
2Meta44.3
3Amazon16.9
4Microsoft12
5Google0.2
6Apple-6.7
7Tesla-28.5

From these numbers, we can see a clear divergence in performance across the group.

Nvidia and Meta Lead

Nvidia is the main hero of this show, setting new all-time highs seemingly every week. The chipmaker is currently the world’s third most valuable company, with a valuation of around $2.2 trillion. This puts it very close to Apple, which is currently valued at $2.7 trillion.

The second best performer of the Magnificent Seven has been Meta, which recently re-entered the trillion dollar club after falling out of favor in 2022. The company saw a massive one-day gain of $197 billion on Feb 2, 2024.

Apple and Tesla in the Red

Tesla has lost over a quarter of its value YTD as EV hype continues to fizzle out. Other pure play EV stocks like Rivian and Lucid are also down significantly in 2024.

Meanwhile, Apple shares have struggled due to weakening demand for its products in China, as well as the company’s lack of progress in the artificial intelligence (AI) space.

Investors may have also been disappointed to hear that Apple’s electric car project, which started a decade ago, has been scrapped.

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