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How Amazon Prime Day Compares to Other Shopping Bonanzas

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How Amazon Prime Day Compares to Other Shopping Bonanzas

How Amazon Prime Day Compares to Other Shopping Bonanzas

The Chart of the Week is a weekly Visual Capitalist feature on Fridays.

Earlier this week, products were flying off their figurative shelves at a pace that is pretty unusual for the summer. That’s because July 11, 2017 was the third-ever Amazon Prime Day – and in just a 30-hour period, the online retailer was able to offload close to $1 billion of merchandise.

The biggest seller of the day was the Amazon Echo Dot, an entry-level product that allows customers to access the company’s personal voice assistant, Amazon Alexa. With a 30% discount, it outsold thousands of other heavily discounted items, propelling Amazon to a 60% increase in revenue over the previous Prime Day in 2016.

At triple the sales of a normal day, it’s fair to say Amazon Prime Day is big – but just how big, exactly?

How Does Amazon Prime Day Compare?

Set up to reward Amazon’s roughly 80 million Prime subscribers once a year, the $1 billion number is pretty impressive even on a grander scale.

Here are the e-commerce numbers for Black Friday and Cyber Monday for all U.S. retailers in 2016:

Shopping DayRetailerE-commerce sales% Increase (from prev. year)
Amazon Prime Day (2017)Amazon$1 billion (est.)60%
Black Friday (2016)All U.S. Retailers$3.3 billion22%
Cyber Monday (2016)All U.S. Retailers$3.5 billion12%

The fact that Prime Day revenue comes from only one retailer makes it quite impressive – especially considering the day falls in the heat of summer, rather than the holiday shopping season. The 60% growth figure is compelling as well, showing that Prime Day could eventually be the biggest U.S. shopping day of the year.

Singled Out by Alibaba

While Amazon Prime Day favors comparably in the U.S. market, it doesn’t even close when looking at single-day events abroad. That’s because since 2009, Chinese e-commerce leader Alibaba has used the Singles’ Day “holiday” to promote sales during the slow period leading up to the Lunar New Year season.

In 2016, Alibaba raked in a whopping $17.8 billion of revenue from Singles’ Day alone.

See the steady growth of the event below:

Alibaba Singles' Day Revenues over time

The concept of setting a global record for e-commerce sales on Singles’ Day sounds a bit strange to us Westerners, but the hype around Singles’ Day is no joke.

The holiday is now a full-on festival in China, with star-studded ceremonies kicking off the 24-hour sales period. For last year’s event, even Kobe Bryant, David and Victoria Beckham, and band OneRepublic made appearances to help ring it in.

A Prime Opportunity

During just the first five minutes of Singles’ Day in 2016, shoppers spent as much money ($1 billion) as Amazon’s entire 30-hour event in 2017.

While that may seem daunting to match, Jeff Bezos has built his tech empire from taking advantage of big opportunities such as this. As a result, it’s likely that Bezos and Amazon both see Singles’ Day as something to emulate – a full-blown festival that could ring in over $10 billion in revenue in one day for Amazon.

After all, it’s already been done once by Jack Ma, so why can’t it be done again in North America?

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Ranked: America’s Largest Semiconductor Companies

This graphic visualizes the market capitalizations of America’s 15 largest semiconductor companies.

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Ranking America’s Largest Semiconductor Companies

As our world moves further into an era of widespread digitization, few industries can be considered as important as semiconductors.

These components are found in almost everything we use on a daily basis, and the ability to produce them domestically has become a topic of national security. For example, in 2022 the Biden administration announced the CHIPS and Science Act, which aims to strengthen America’s position in everything from clean energy to artificial intelligence.

With this in mind, we’ve ranked the top 15 U.S. semiconductor companies by their market capitalizations.

Data and Highlights

The data we used to create this infographic is listed in the table below. Year-to-date (YTD) returns were included for additional context. Both metrics are as of May 30, 2023.

RankCompanyTickerMarket Cap (USD billions)YTD Return
1NvidiaNVDA$992180.2%
2BroadcomAVGO$33545.1%
3AMDAMD$20295.7%
4Texas InstrumentsTXN$1608.2%
5QualcommQCOM$1298.2%
6IntelINTC$12512.2%
7Applied MaterialsAMAT$11541.2%
8Analog DevicesADI$899.2%
9Lam ResearchLRCX$8552.1%
10Micron TechnologyMU$7842.3%
11SnyopsysSNPS$7145.4%
12KLAKLAC$6321.8%
13Marvell Technology GroupMRVL$5476.2%
14Microchip TechnologyMCHP$4211.2%
15ON SemiconductorON$3636.3%

At the top is Nvidia, which became America’s newest $1 trillion company on Tuesday, May 30th. Shares pulled back slightly over the day and Nvidia closed at $992 billion. Over the past decade, Nvidia has transformed from a gaming-focused graphics card producer to a global leader in AI and data center chips.

In third and sixth place are two of America’s most well known chipmakers, AMD and Intel. These longtime rivals are moving in opposite trajectories, with AMD shares climbing 770% over the past five years, and Intel shares falling 47%. One reason for this is the data center segment, in which AMD appears to be stealing market share from Intel.

Further down the list we see Applied Materials in seventh, and Lam Research in ninth. Both firms specialize in semiconductor manufacturing equipment and thus play an important role in the industry’s supply chain.

Trade War Impacts

As tensions between the U.S. and China escalate, chipmakers are becoming increasingly entangled in geopolitical conflict.

In October 2022, the Biden administration introduced new export controls aimed at blocking China’s access to semiconductors produced with U.S. equipment. This impacted several companies in our top 15 list, including Lam Research and Applied Materials.

Shortly after the export controls were announced, Lam Research said it expected to lose upwards of $2.5 billion in annual revenues.

We lost some very profitable customers in the China region, and that’s going to persist, obviously.
– Doug Bettinger, CFO, Lam Research

In response, China announced in May 2023 that it would no longer allow America’s largest memory chipmaker, Micron, to sell its products to “critical national infrastructure operators”.

This is not the first time Micron has been involved in a controversy with China. In 2018, the firm alleged that Fujian Jinhua Integrated Circuit, a Chinese state-owned company, had solicited a Micron employee to steal specifications for memory chips. The U.S. Department of Commerce imposed export restrictions on Fujian Jinhua as a result.

Chipmakers on both sides of the Pacific will be closely watching as competition between these two countries heats up.

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