Apple did the seemingly impossible a few years ago in toppling Hewlett-Packard from the top spot in the SV150, the Mercury News annual list of Silicon Valley s biggest companies, where it had reigned for 25 years. Since rising to the top spot, Apple has grown into the same dominant force HP was for so many years, with numbers that boggle the mind.
– The SV150 database tracks 10 important financial metrics. Apple is No. 1 in eight of them – Revenues, profits, research and development, cash on hand, debt, dividends paid, stock repurchases and provision for taxes. Apple came in second, barely, to Google in capital expenditure spending with $10.8 billion to the Mountain View search giant s $10.96 billion and is No. 4 in total employees after increasing its workforce more than 15 percent in 2014.
– Apple s dominant sales total is reaching levels previously only HP achieved, when the Palo Alto tech giant had revenue totals three or four times its closest Silicon Valley tech competitor. With $199.8 billion in 2014 revenues, Apple came incredibly close to being the first Valley tech company to top $200 billion while HP was the only other company that managed to top $100 billion. That dominance is likely to hit new heights this year, when Apple should top the $200 billion mark while HP s impending corporate split keeps any other Valley tech company from reaching even $100 billion.
– For some perspective on Apple s rise, we can look back a decade. In 2004, Apple was the No. 8 tech firm in Silicon Valley, lower than lost luminaries Sun Microsystems and Solectron, with less than $10 billion in revenues and $500 million in profits. And it s not like the rest of Silicon Valley has changed that much in the past decade – Apple s 2004 performance would have been the 12th best sales total of 2014, just four spots below its place back then.
– Apple s sales total was more than its two closest competitors, HP and Google, combined, but more incredulously, Apple racked up more revenues than the total of all SV150 companies outside the top 10. Nos. 11-150 on this year s SV150 – a group that includes Applied Materials, SanDisk, Tesla Motors and many other prominent, successful companies – totaled $192 billion in revenues in 2014.
– Apple s profit total of $44.46 billion may be even more unbelievable than its revenues. Only the next four largest Silicon Valley companies – HP, Google, Intel and Cisco – managed to rack up totals that topped Apple s , and those four combined did not have as many profits as Apple, with $39.76 billion. The other 145 companies in the SV150 also failed to combine to match Apple s profits, with $43.6 billion total.
– Apple is the most valuable company in the world, and it dominates Wall Street with placement on all three major U.S. indexes since joining the Dow Jones industrial average earlier this year. Its dominance in the SV150 is even greater: At the end of the first quarter, Apple s market capitalization of $744.1 billion was almost exactly one quarter of the Wall Street valuation of the entire SV150.
– Apple s dominance on Wall Street shows that tech has managed to match, if not exceed, the importance of other sectors, but one milestone reached in 2014 drives that home even more. While Apple has been the biggest tech company in Silicon Valley based on revenues the past four years, it wasn t until 2014 that it became the largest company in the Bay Area: Apple managed to pass San Ramon oil giant Chevron in sales last year. Just four years ago, when Apple landed on the top of the SV150 list for the first time with $127.8 billion in revenues, Chevron blew that total away with $236.3 billion.
– Despite increasing its workforce by 15 percent in 2014 and nearing 100,000 employees, Apple still brought in more than $2 million in sales per worker, the third highest revenue-per-employee ratio on the SV150. Only Gilead Sciences, at $3.56 million, and Netflix, at $2.51 million, managed to top Apple s $2.16 million in sales per employee.
– Apple s ability to generate huge streams of cash at high profit margins has affected the entire SV150, but what Apple is doing with that cash is also emblematic of changing practices throughout the region s tech firms. Most glaring is investor return: Apple shipped $56.16 billion back to investors last year through stock repurchases and dividends, more than the entire SV150 had returned to shareholders combined in any year previous to 2013. Apple, which had avoided dividends for 17 years until establishing one in 2012, accounted for more than 40 percent of Silicon Valley s record $134.4 billion in cash shipped to investors last year.
– Despite all that money heading to Wall Street, Apple still increased the cash it has at its disposal by 12 percent in 2014, ending the year with just shy of $178 billion in the bank. That cash is conceivably enough to buy all but three other Silicon Valley tech companies: Only Google, Facebook and Oracle have market caps higher than $178 billion.
– Despite all that cash in its accounts, Apple still more than doubled its debt in 2014, taking advantage of low interest rates and hunger for reliable corporate bonds. Apple increased its debt more than 114 percent to $36.4 billion, which is more than the annual revenues of all but six Silicon Valley tech companies.
– Despite all that money headed to Wall Street all that cash in its accounts a rapidly increasing debt total, Apple still managed to increase R&D spending by 37.8 percent, capital-expenditure spending by 37.9 percent, and its workforce by 15.3 percent.
Photo by Paul Sakuma/Associated Press
