We all know companies like Amazon (AMZN -1.11%) and Apple (AAPL -0.81%) are huge, but it's tough for many investors to truly grasp just how huge they are. In this Fool Live video clip, recorded on April 8, The Motley Fool's chief growth officer Anand Chokkavelu talks with Fool.com contributors Matt Frankel, CFP, and Jason Hall about some of the most amazing statistics about these and other big tech companies.
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Anand Chokkavelu: Now, we'll move on to "best wow stat." I've done the work for you guys, so all you guys have to do is pick one. But I think it's going to be tough, I'm having a hard time figuring out which one I will vote for even now. Here's the best wow stat I could think of for each of these. I'm sure there are like 15 others that top these. But for Facebook (META -1.12%), it's the 3.3 billion users in their family of networks, so between Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. If you have an internet connection, there's a 70% chance you're a monthly active user of one of Facebook's networks which is wild, 70% of the globe that's internet capable. Next one is Apple. In 2020, Apple made almost three times as much profit as Starbucks had sales, which is wild. Alphabet (GOOG 0.56%) (GOOGL 0.69%), the Google search engine. Now, I'll say this one. I'm not positive positive on this stat. But the source is StatCounter Global Stats. Google search engine market share is 89% in the US, but it's actually more dominant in other parts of the world, Canada hits 92%, Europe is 93%, and this one, 99% market share in India. Pretty amazing. Amazon, the obvious one for Amazon is its share of U.S. e-commerce. It still blows my mind that it's about 40%. That includes all the online sales you'd make from Walmart, Target, Home Depot, eBay, Stores like Macy's, Best Buy, Apple selling its product on its own, still with all of that, Amazon is 40% of U.S. e-commerce. Then the last one is Microsoft (MSFT -0.66%). For me, what's amazing about is its penetration into businesses. There's a company called Flexera, they made a 2021 state of tech spend report. They showed which vendors people are actually using through a survey. As a top-three vendor, Microsoft is in 84% of those businesses, it's a top-three vendor. To give you some perspective, No. 2 was AWS, Amazon's, at 43%, so it's about double Amazon's penetration, then trailing them are companies like Oracle, salesforce.com, IBM, Google, ServiceNow, Adobe. Those are the five stats. Which one jumps out at each of you?
Jason Hall: Matt, go ahead.
Matt Frankel: I like that Apple's stat. Apple is just an incredible business. Just to add one to that, Apple sold over $8 billion of iPads in its most recent quarter and that was by far the least impressive part of its business. That's less than 10% of its total revenue. It's mind-blowing how big that company is.
Chokkavelu: Same with Apple Watch. Where it's so dominant, but who cares?
Hall: I'm going to go off script a little. This is an Apple stat. Operating margins. Apple has higher operating margins than Alphabet does.
Chokkavelu: Wow.
Hall: There's nothing about that that's logical. But it's their business model that's so good. They're a design company, they are really not a manufacturer, they're a design company and a services company. That to me is the most telling thing about Apple.
Chokkavelu: Yeah, there's no physical cost of goods sold in a search.
Hall: Yeah, that's the thing. In the same way, Microsoft obviously is at the top and should be. But it's just incredible that's where they are.
