Technology

Internet Giants: Who Owns Who on the Web

Published

5 years ago

March 1, 2018

Jeff Desjardins

Internet Giants: Who Owns Who on the Web

View the high resolution version of today’s graphic by clicking here.

In the brick and mortar world, decades of consolidation has led certain conglomerates to wield massive amounts of control in the banking, consumer goods, alcohol, and auto sectors.

And although the internet is incredibly vast in scale and much newer, it’s also heading in a similar direction.

As a result, it’s not unusual to see behemoths like Facebook, Alphabet, and Amazon leveraging their size, networks, and market leading positions to buy up competitors while also making other strategic acquisitions. This ongoing consolidation has created a vast web of subsidiaries, providing each parent organization with additional insurance in maintaining their position at the top of the digital food chain.

The Connected Web

Today’s infographic comes to us from 16Best, and it shows the companies or websites that are owned by the bigger fish.

They fall into two categories, generally:

1. Gobbling Up the Competition
What better way to ensure dominance than to eat up all of the smaller fish that do the same thing you do?

Look at Expedia, a company that owns fellow travel sites Travelocity, Hotels.com, Trivago, Orbitz, Hotwire, and CarRentals.com. Another example is Groupon, a company that bought competitor LivingSocial, as well as Crazeal (originally a local deal site in India).

2. Strategy and Tactics
Whether it is future proofing, apparent synergies, or filling a weakness, this broad category makes up the majority of situations. Here we see the internet giants making strategic acquisitions to ensure future success.

A good example of this is Facebook’s acquisition of Oculus, which allows the social network giant to enter into the VR business – the exact type of new venture that would be nearly impossible to do without help and expertise in a complex technical field.

Correction: A previous version of this graphic listed PayPal as a subsidiary of eBay. PayPal was spun off into a separate publicly traded company in 2015.

Related Topics:subsidiaries web consolidation giants internet

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Technology

Nvidia Joins the Trillion Dollar Club

America’s biggest chipmaker Nvidia has joined the trillion dollar club as advancements in AI move at lightning speed.

Published

4 days ago

May 30, 2023

Dorothy Neufeld

Nvidia Joins the Trillion Dollar Club

Chipmaker Nvidia is now worth nearly as much as Amazon.

America’s largest semiconductor company has vaulted past the $1 trillion market capitalization mark, a milestone reached by just a handful of companies including Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft. While many of these are household names, Nvidia has only recently gained widespread attention amid the AI boom.

The above graphic compares Nvidia to the seven companies that have reached the trillion dollar club.

Riding the AI Wave

Nvidia’s market cap has more than doubled in 2023 to over $1 trillion.

The company designs semiconductor chips that are made of silicon slices that contain specific patterns. Just like you flip an electrical switch by turning on a light at home, these chips have billions of switches that process complex information simultaneously.

Today, they are integral to many AI functions—from OpenAI’s ChatGPT to image generation. Here’s how Nvidia stands up against companies that have achieved the trillion dollar milestone:

	Joined Club	Market Cap in trillions	Peak Market Cap in trillions
Apple	Aug 2018	$2.78	$2.94
Microsoft	Apr 2019	$2.47	$2.58
Aramco	Dec 2019	$2.06	$2.45
Alphabet	Jul 2020	$1.58	$1.98
Amazon	Apr 2020	$1.25	$1.88
Meta	Jun 2021	$0.68	$1.07
Tesla	Oct 2021	$0.63	$1.23
Nvidia	May 2023	$1.02	$1.02

Note: Market caps as of May 30th, 2023

After posting record sales, the company added $184 billion to its market value in one day. Only two other companies have exceeded this number: Amazon ($191 billion), and Apple ($191 billion).

As Nvidia’s market cap reaches new heights, many are wondering if its explosive growth will continue—or if the AI craze is merely temporary. There are cases to be made on both sides.

Bull Case Scenario

Big tech companies are racing to develop capabilities like OpenAI. These types of generative AI require vastly higher amounts of computing power, especially as they become more sophisticated.

Many tech giants, including Google and Microsoft use Nvidia chips to power their AI operations. Consider how Google plans to use generative AI in six products in the future. Each of these have over 2 billion users.

Nvidia has also launched new products days since its stratospheric rise, spanning from robotics to gaming. Leading the way is the A100, a powerful graphics processing unit (GPU) well-suited for machine learning. Additionally, it announced a new supercomputer platform that Google, Microsoft, and Meta are first in line for. Overall, 65,000 companies globally use the company’s chips for a wide range of functions.

Bear Case Scenario

While extreme investor optimism has launched Nvidia to record highs, how do some of its fundamental valuations stack up to other giants?

As the table below shows, its price to earnings (P/E) ratio is second-only to Amazon, at 214.4. This shows how much a shareholder pays compared to the earnings of a company. Here, the company’s share price is over 200 times its earnings on a per share basis.

	P/E Ratio	Net Profit Margin (Annual)
Apple	30.2	25.3%
Microsoft	36.1	36.7%
Aramco	13.5	26.4%
Alphabet	28.2	21.2%
Amazon	294.2	-0.5%
Meta	33.9	19.9%
Tesla	59.0	15.4%
Nvidia	214.4	16.19%

Consider how this looks for revenue of Nvidia compared to other big tech names:

$NVDA $963 billion market cap, 38x Revenue
$MSFT $2.5 trillion market cap, 12x Revenue$TSLA $612 billion market cap, 7.8x Revenue$AAPL $2.75 trillion market cap, 7.3x Revenue$GOOG $1.6 trillion market cap, 6.1x Revenue$META $672 billion market cap, 6x Revenue pic.twitter.com/VgkKAfiydx

— Martin Pelletier (@MPelletierCIO) May 29, 2023

For some, Nvidia’s valuation seems unrealistic even in spite of the prospects of AI. While Nvidia has $11 billion in projected revenue for the next quarter, it would still mean significantly higher multiples than its big tech peers. This suggests the company is overvalued at current prices.

Nvidia’s Growth: Will it Last?

This is not the first time Nvidia’s market cap has rocketed up.

During the crypto rally of 2021, its share price skyrocketed over 100% as demand for its GPUs increased. These specialist chips help mine cryptocurrency, and a jump in demand led to a shortage of chips at the time.

As cryptocurrencies lost their lustre, Nvidia’s share price sank over 46% the following year.

By comparison, AI advancements could have more transformative power. Big tech is rushing to partner with Nvidia, potentially reshaping everything from search to advertising.