Apple world’s most valuable company at $2.4 trillion

Facebook and Tencent added $700bn, semiconductor giants Nvidia and TSMC added $600bn, whilst Tesla led the EV sector, adding $500bn of value. Between them, these 10 companies added $6tn of value

Hyderabad: Apple emerged as the world’s most valuable company, up 15 per cent to $2.4 trillion (tn) as of 15 July 2021. The ‘World’s Big Four’ comprising Apple, Microsoft, Amazon and Alphabet created a value of $4tn, driven by the growth in cloud services amid a maturing of the digital economy, as per the second edition of the Hurun Global 500 list.

Facebook and Tencent added $700bn, semiconductor giants Nvidia and TSMC added $600bn, whilst Tesla led the EV sector, adding $500bn of value. Between them, these 10 companies added $6tn of value, one third of the $18tn total value created in the almost two years since the pandemic began.

India has 12 companies in the second edition of the list, up one, led by Reliance Industries with $188bn, up 11 per cent, and Tata Consultancy Services with $164bn, followed by HDFC Bank with $113bn.

The Hurun Research Institute released the 2021 Hurun Global 500, a list of the 500 most valuable non-state-controlled companies in the world, ranked according to their value, defined as market capitalisation for listed companies and valuations for non-listed companies. The cut-off date used is 15 July 2021.

Rupert Hoogewerf, chairman and chief researcher of Hurun Report, said, “It is easy to see why the Hurun G500 represents the most powerful group of companies in the world. With a total value of $58tn, they make up the backbone of the world’s economy. Together these 500 companies had combined sales of $18.4tn, bigger than the GDP of China, and employed 43 million staff, equivalent to the working population of Germany.”

“This year the Hurun Global 500 added $8.5tn of value, on the back of a maturing of the digital economy and new technologies, especially in healthcare post Covid, but also helped by trillion-dollar economic stimulus packages, which have helped drive up stock markets to records heights, particularly in the US,” he added.

The rumbling US-China trade war has spilled over into an acceleration of a decoupling of the economies, fuelling competition for high-tech sectors such as semiconductors. The global shortage of chips, which are now required in everything from smartphones to cars, has sparked competition in their design and production.

About 80 per cent of the world’s most successful start-ups, unicorns valued at over $1bn, are from the US and China, suggesting that these two economies have the lion’s share of the next wave of potential Global 500 companies.

Only three individuals in history have created more than one Hurun Global 500 company. Elon Musk is co-founder of three, led by Tesla in the Top 10, PayPal and SpaceX. The other two are from China. Jack Ma, despite his recent troubles, has two with Alibaba and Ant Group. The other is Shanghai-based Li Ge with biotech companies WuXi Biologics and WuXi AppTec, both of which have almost doubled in value in the past year.