The 3 Tech Giants: Income Statements Compared

You can tell a lot about a company by looking at its financials.

The purpose of this post is to look at income statements of Apple, Google, and Facebook. And we try to point out any interesting similarities or differences between these companies, based on the numbers. Of course these 3 companies work in different industries and the numbers are not comparable to each other, but what I’m trying to do here is to get some feel of what the margins and cost structure of these giants are.

(Apple and Google income statements are taken from the latest 10-k filing, and Facebook’s income statement is taken from their from S-1, with some formatting done by myself for comparison purposes.)

So here they are,

What can we learn from this?

1) Net Sales/Revenues, Apple currently makes way more money (net sales/revenues) than google and Facebook combined. With the popularity of its products it’s no wonder Apple is the most valuable tech company in the world. It’s net income (profits), though the lowest of the 3 in terms of percentage of revenues (24%), are the biggest in terms of real dollars, 25.9 billion dollars, almost 3 times as much as google’s profits and 25 times Facebook profits. Please note that the profits in terms of percentages of revenues between the companies are not far off with apple, google, and Facebook at 24%, 26%, and 27%

2) Gross Margins, In terms of gross margin however, Facebook is leading the pack with a 77% gross margin, while google is second at 65% and Apple at 40%. This is because the difference in industries, Facebook and Google are internet companies whose costs of revenue are mainly salaries, revenue share to publishers, and data center costs. It’s online presence allows it to deliver its services at a relatively cheap price and it shows in the gross margins. Apple, on the other hand, is a brick and mortar manufacturing and retail company. They have raw material costs, production and distribution costs, including the costs to staff, stock, and maintain the apple stores they have all over the world.

3) What about Research and Development? No surprise that Google leads the pack with an R&D budget of $5.1 billion dollars (14% of revenue). Apple on the other hand only allocates 2% of its total revenue (2.4 billion dollars) to R&D. Facebook allocates 388 million dollars to R&D, around 10% of its total revenue. Please note that even though Apple only contributes 2% of its sales, that amount is more than enough for apple to keep generating new products. I wonder what would happen if Apple allocated more than that to R&D, what kind of new products would we see in the future?

4) Selling, general and Administrative and Total Operating Expense, Apple’s selling, general and administrative (SGA) costs total 7% of total revenue (7.59 billion dollars), while and google and Facebook’s SGA costs are a higher percentage of revenue (21% and 20%) but lower in terms of dollar values (7.8 billion dollars and 707 million dollars). Whats amazing to me is that in terms of Total Operating Expense, Apple is the most efficient of three with a total operating expense of 9% of revenues (10 billion dollars), which is even lower than google’s total operating expense of 12.9 billion dollars, around 34% of google’s total revenues. Facebook’s total operating expense is 1 billion dollars, 30% of total revenues. This demonstrates that Apple is an incredibly efficient company, and no wonder its profits are so high. These high profits are also due to the fact that they can get away with selling items at ridiculously high prices.

So there we have it, the income statements of the 3 tech giants today compared side by side. What do you think, any ideas or comments?

Creating and monetizing

Instagram was recently bought by facebook for 1 billion dollars in cash and stock. For a company thats been around for only 3 years with no revenue, that is crazy.

What can we learn from this?

Instagram is an outlier.

Creating a product and hoping for it to get bought at an absurd value is not a business plan. It almost never happens.

Creating a product that solves a specific problem and brings value to users, that always has to be the key.

In this industry the focus should be your customers, your users. Know your market and what problems they are facing. Create products that address these problems.

Only if you manage to create something that attracts million of users can you think of monetizing. If by then you haven’t figured out how yet, don’t worry, this is a good problem to have.

What you don’t want to is to ruin the user experience for the sake of monetizing and ruining your product in the process. If this is the case, you have lost the battle even before it has begun.

If your product is great somebody will eventually pay for it. It might be from the millions of users you have, or in other forms, like a 1 billion dollar payout from a huge company. Who knows right?

Google: Project Glass

This is a concept video from Project Glass,

 

Maybe we already are living in the future.

45 million users

There are 45 million registered facebook users in Indonesia.

What does this even mean?

I guess you can use this figure to demonstrate that Indonesian youth are tech savvy, connected, and sophisticated.

I dont know what the precise number is but the 45 million figure must be close to the internet penetration number in Indonesia.

Meaning almost every Indonesian that uses the internet has a facebook account.

What I’d like to see are metrics showing how the internet has improved the quality of life in Indonesia.

After all thats what the internet should be, right? A tool to improve life.

Such metrics, for example, would be number of wikipedia articles created and viewed in bahasa. The number of online businesses created and transactions done. How much easier it is to find things and connect with people and create new value.

I wonder of there are such metrics and if there even is a way to measure such things.

Saying Indonesia has the most facebook users is nice, but so what?

It still means we are just users.