The giants with the greatest value have one thing in common: their products and services are things we use in our daily lives.
And as this everyday life becomes even more technological, it is obviously normal for companies operating in the technology industry to occupy the top.
Forbes's annual list of the world's top companies proves just that: that the biggest winners in the pandemic coronavirus were already winners at the end of 2019.
Not only were they not affected by the global health crisis, but they remained at the top despite the pandemic. So have shown the months that followed in 2020, for which we will have a better estimate of time.
The list of the 100 largest companies of Forbes concerns the financial year of 2019, before the coronavirus hit the universe.
As people locked in their homes and the market locked up internationally, service companies such as Amazon, Netflix and PayPal saw their revenues skyrocket. But this was happening throughout 2019, Forbes emphasizes meaningfully.
The e-commerce, pay-per-view platforms and online payments were the industries that gained momentum in the pandemic, but they did not do so until 2020. The trend started last year and is reflected in the Forbes rankings.
Of course, this does not mean that things are stable at the top of the business world.
Forbes is recruiting a complex grid of measurements to decide on its annual ranking.
Turnover, profits, taxes, price-to-earnings ratio and capitalization are just some of the indicators that the magazine takes into account to give its estimates regarding the brand value that a company has.
In other words, it does not classify companies according to their commercial value. THE Apple Lossless Audio CODEC (ALAC),, for example, has a capitalization of more than 2 trillion. But its brand value, according to Forbes, is around 240 billion dollars.
But what is the famous brand value? One of the best answers has been given by the marketing expert and big name in branding worldwide, David Brier:
"The value of a brand (brand value) is just the sum of the extra amount that people are willing to spend. Or how often they choose, what memories they have, what stories and what relationship with one company from the others in the competition ".
But also Steve Jobs he had said it well: “For me, marketing has to do with values. This is a very complicated world, a very noisy world. And so we will not have the opportunity to make people remember much about us. No company has it. We must therefore be very clear about what exactly we want them to know about us. "
Forbes scrambled into the universe of the world's 200 largest companies to find the ones with the highest brand value. Weighing naturally objective indicators such as income and profits before interest, depreciation and taxes.
Then she looked at the position that everyone has in their industry during the previous three years (2017-2019).
According to his measurements, the 100 most valuable companies in the world are worth a total of 2,54 trillion. dollars. An amount that is increased compared to last year's list (2,33 trillion).
US-based companies account for more than 50% of the list. Countries with a significant presence are Germany (10 companies), France (9 companies), Japan (6 companies) and Switzerland (5 companies).
As for the industries, the technology industry was again the winner, with 20 of the 100 companies on the list. And not only that, but also the first 5 places of the ranking. And 4 other companies in the Top 20 (Samsung, Intel, Cisco and Oracle).
Second were the financial services sector (14 companies), the automotive industry (11) and the retail sector (8).
Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Facebook are the largest companies in the world, according to Forbes. But even in the top five, which remains the same as last year's list, the landscape is not swampy.
Η Microsoft, for example, last year was one of the five companies with the largest increase in their value.
Compared to 2019, Netflix saw its value (brand value always) increase by 72%, Chanel by 42%, Amazon by 40%, Microsoft by 30% and PayPal by 24%.
At the same time, the Facebook giant was at the same time the company that recorded the largest losses in value. And of course she was not the only one.
The Facebook lost exactly 2020% in the 21 list, Wells Fargo 16%, Mercedes-Benz 14%, Ford 14% and General Electric also 14%.
However, we also had changes in the old and fixed ones of the Forbes list. That is, where companies like Nintendo, Burger King, Hennessy and AXA found their way to the top 100 in the world, others were magically thrown out. And the names here are big: Philips, Hewlett Packard, Nissan and Kellogg's.
The question that arises effortlessly is how the corresponding list will be formed in 2021, when it will include the world-historical changes brought by the pandemic in 2020. Why may the initial five seem unshakable, the fact that Facebook lost 21% in a time (2018-2019) maybe something shows.
We observe several changes between last year and this year's ranking and again they are not accidental. Visa, for example, jumped from 25th to No. 18 this year. As did Adidas, which went from 61st to 51st place, but also Netflix, which went up from No. 38 to No. 26.
We also see such significant movements in the luxury products sector. Chanel rose from 79th to 52nd place and Cartier from 64th to 56th.
The surprises are the newcomers of the list, companies like Nintendo, Hennessy, Burger King and AXA, which are now in the top 100 companies in the world.
It is also surprising that some of the companies with the biggest losses are big and historical names in the industry that now seems to monopolize the business. General Electric, Hewlett Packard and IBM measured losses of 14%, 12% and 10%, respectively, in one year.
Forbes makes special mention of Walmart, which increased their size by 12% and climbed from 26th to 19th place. The retail giant even had to compete with the giant Amazon, as it entered its fields dynamically, and did remarkably well.
We see steady declines in the annual Forbes listings and this year it was the car industry that was crowned a big loser. THE Mercedes-Benz fell from 17th to 23rd place and BMW from 21st to 27th.
And that was pretty good news for the industry, as Nissan was permanently left out of the 100 list (last year it was in 81st place). Also shocking were the blows received by Wells Fargo (from No. 42 in 2018 to No. 69 in 2019) and KFC (from 86th to 96th place).
As the competition gets fiercer, the old and historic brands now have a new risk to manage: startups. The example of Gillette is typical here.
Gillette continued to be under great pressure from two new players in the market. Harry's startup, which was acquired last year for $ 1,4 billion by Edgewell Personal Care, and the Dollar Shave Club, which Unilever rushed to acquire in 2016 for $ 1 billion.
The future list of 2021, which will include the ranking of 2020, the year that necessarily belongs to the coronavirus, will undoubtedly be of greater interest. As Forbes points out:
"Next year's Top 100 companies may look as different from this year as the effects of the crisis Covid-19 and the economic downturn will continue to affect both large and small companies around the world. "
The magazine predicts, however, that the companies with the highest profits in brand value for 2019, such as Amazon, Netflix and PayPal, it seems that they will be crowned winners during the pandemic period.
The industries in which they operate have a golden dynamic that can hardly be stopped.
No 1: Apple - Brand Value: $ 241,2 billion
No 2: Google - Brand Value: $ 207,5 billion
No 3: Microsoft - Brand Value: $ 162,9 billion
No 4: Amazon - Brand Value: $ 135,4 billion
No 5: Facebook - Brand Value: $ 70,3 billion
No 6: Coca-Cola - Brand Value: $ 64,4 billion
No 7: Disney - Brand Value: $ 61,3 billion
No 8: Samsung - Brand Value: $ 50,4 billion
No 9: Louis Vuitton - Brand Value: $ 47,2 billion
No 10: McDonald's - Brand Value: $ 46,1 billion
No 11: Toyota - Brand Value: $ 41,5 billion
No 12: Intel - Brand Value: $ 39,5 billion
No 13: Nike - Brand Value: $ 39,1 billion
No 14: AT&T - Brand Value: $ 37,3 billion
No 15: Cisco - Brand Value: $ 36 billion
No 16: Oracle - Brand Value: $ 35,7 billion
No 17: Verizon - Brand Value: $ 32,3 billion
No 18: Visa - Brand Value: $ 31,8 billion
No 19: Walmart - Brand Value: $ 29,5 billion
No 20: General Electric - Brand Value: $ 29,5 billion
See all Forbes list here.