Takeaways From The 100 Largest Public Companies | Hacker News Reader

Takeaways From The 100 Largest Public Companies

blog.eladgil.com

27 pointseladgil6 comments

At first blush, considering Microsoft a wholly B2B company seems so naive that it made me lose faith in the author.

Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Apple all have B2B SBUs. That doesn't mean they're necessarily B2B companies.

I actually mention this at the bottom of the post - i.e. "Also, MSFT is a bit ambiguous as it has both consumer and enterprise revenue."

I think in the end it makes sense to classify Microsoft as B2B as: a. For much of its history it has been predominantly a B2B company for its products that got traction (O/S, Windows, Office are used by consumers, but the big $ customers of these products have traditionally been IT companies). With the exception of XBOX, most of its consumer products have been big money losers.

b. Even today, the majority of Microsoft profits are from enterprise or SMB sales of its O/S, Windows, and Office products. Its core consumer products (MSN etc.) are largely money losers. So if you think of MSFT as a business, it mainly makes money off of other businesses.

Why use Market Cap, which is affected by arbitrary earning multiples that are swayed by forces outside of the company's control? An analysis based on revenue or profits seems much more reliable.

I definitely agree that markets are in-efficient in how they price companies at a given moment. I also think it would be interesting to do the same analysis with e.g. cash flow the core metric.

However, I do think market cap is a reasonable proxy as factors like growth (which can strongly impact market cap) have interesting implications for where an entrepreneur should or should not build a business.

For growth, looking at the historical revenues/profits/cashflows would be a better gauge than market cap. Public companies disclose annual numbers for the last 4 years in their 10-K statements, and you can look farther back by looking at historical 10-K statements.

Market cap is a proxy that has too many outside factors and should be eschewed in favor of more concrete and reliable numbers since they are readily available.

What I meant is that growth is often factored into market caps (PGE).

I agree with you that a more complex analysis could be done and it would be more rigorous and it may reveal additional insights.

However, I am guessing the primary takeaways I listed would not change much with the additional rigor.

Your comments also raise an interesting question - i.e. what are the right measures by an entrepreneur for the value their company is creating? There are obvious points of human impact (user base, engagement etc.), but if you are an entrepreneur, what financial metric should you care about? For example, Jeff Bezos often point to free cash flow as the big metric Amazon tracks...

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