Technology

Turning Down Billions: Grading 15 Tech Companies that Declined Big Takeover Offers

Published

8 years ago

October 27, 2015

Jeff Desjardins

Turning Down Billions: Grading 15 Tech Companies that Declined Big Takeover Offers

If you were to ask legendary investor Peter Thiel about the most important moment in Facebook history, he would point to an exchange in July 2006.

Yahoo had made the lucrative offer of $1 billion for Facebook, and Peter Thiel as well as board member Jim Breyer got called into a meeting about the deal with Mark Zuckerberg.

“Both Breyer and myself on balance thought we probably should take the money,” recalls Thiel. “But Zuckerberg started the meeting like, ‘This is kind of a formality, just a quick board meeting, it shouldn’t take more than 10 minutes. We’re obviously not going to sell here’.”

Thiel and Breyer thought Facebook should take the money. Zuckerberg, who was 22 years old at the time, had so much conviction that Yahoo did not understand the value of the company, that he dismissed the meeting as just a formality. Thiel and Breyer eventually backed Zuckerberg based on this, and the decision paid giant dividends.

Facebook’s market capitalization is now $288 billion, or 288x the amount offered by Yahoo in 2006.

Today’s infographic recalls 15 offers to emerging tech companies that were declined. Then, looking back in retrospect, it shows whether the deal was a “win” or a “fail” based on the current value of the company.

Original graphic by: Empire Flippers

Related Topics:tech mergers m&a acquisitions takeover offers

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Technology

Ranked: The World’s Top 10 Electronics Exporters (2000-2021)

Here are the largest electronics exporters by country, highlighting how electronics trade has increasingly shifted to Asia over 20 years.

Published

2 days ago

December 3, 2023

Marcus Lu

Visualized: The Top 10 Electronics Exporters in the World

Top 10 Electronics Exporters in the World (2000-2021)

From personal computers to memory chips, the electronics trade plays a vital role in the world economy. In 2021, global electronics exports reached $4.1 trillion according to McKinsey Global Institute.

This graphic shows the 10 largest electronics exporters in the world, based on data from McKinsey, and how they’ve changed since 2000.

Ranked: The Top 10 Exporters of Electronics

Which countries are the leading exporters of electronics, and how has this shifted over the last two decades?

Rank	Country	Share of Total 2021	Share of Total 2000
1	🇨🇳 China	34%	9%
2	🇹🇼 Taiwan	11%	6%
3	🇰🇷 South Korea	7%	5%
4	🇻🇳 Vietnam	5%	N/A
5	🇲🇾 Malaysia	5%	5%
6	🇯🇵 Japan	4%	13%
7	🇺🇸 United States	4%	16%
8	🇩🇪 Germany	4%	5%
9	🇲🇽 Mexico	3%	3%
10	🇹🇭 Thailand	3%	N/A
	Other	20%	30%

We can see in the above table how global electronics trade has become more concentrated in Asia, specifically China and Taiwan. As an electronics powerhouse, 34% of the world’s electronic goods in 2021 came from China, representing $1.4 trillion in value.

Home to leading firms like TSMC, Taiwan also plays a major role due to its prowess in semiconductor manufacturing—highlighting the island’s global importance.

But not all of Asia has been thriving. In 2000, Japan was a global electronics powerhouse responsible for 13% of the industry’s exports, but has seen its share shrink to 4% in 2021. The U.S. has also sheen its electronics lead shrink, with exports down from 16% of the global total in 2000 to just 4% in 2021.

Several factors have driven this shift. Instead of manufacturing electronics domestically, the U.S. has outsourced technology to countries where manufacturing, production, and labor costs are lower. However, recently, the U.S. is focusing on reshoring semiconductor production specifically given its role in national security, as seen through the $52.7 billion CHIPS Act.