Apple captures 50% of consumer revenue of the top half of the S&P 500

Posted by zdw 14 hours ago

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Comments

Comment by AnotherGoodName 13 hours ago

This makes no sense at all

Amazon $716.92 billion revenue 2025

Apple $416.16 billion revenue 2025

That's just one company that has more let alone the whole index combined dwarfing Apple.

Where does that graph that shows apple as a 100x outlier on consumer revenue even come from? It's not at all correct and doesn't pass the most basic smell test. Yet this is an entire article about this hallucinated fact?

Comment by pdpi 13 hours ago

The "top 20 of 2026" table in the article puts Amazon at $776B, but only 3.75% of that ($29B) attributed to B2C revenue. I don't know whether that number is correct, but AWS is clearly a massive chunk of non-B2C revenue for Amazon.

Comment by A_D_E_P_T 13 hours ago

It's WAY off, lol

> https://bullfincher.io/companies/amazoncom/revenue-by-segmen...

Well over 60% of their revenue is B2C, strictly defined.

Comment by _diyar 13 hours ago

60% is online stores. Is that known as B2C?

Comment by unsnap_biceps 13 hours ago

B2C: Business to Consumer

B2B: Business to Business

Comment by _diyar 13 hours ago

Yea thanks, but I know. The question is whether the online store revenue is mainly from consumers or businesses.

Comment by AnotherGoodName 12 hours ago

Well considering this article counted exactly 100% of Apples revenue as B2C its clearly an inconsistent definition.

Comment by maattdd 13 hours ago

Of course.

Comment by _diyar 13 hours ago

Source?

Comment by 13 hours ago

Comment by jonas21 13 hours ago

The same table also lists Walmart as 5% B2C revenue. There's clearly something wrong here.

Comment by indosauros 13 hours ago

They're not accounting for the Walmart Cloud Servers I run my business on

Comment by AnotherGoodName 13 hours ago

In the meantime it counts literally 100% of Apples revenue as B2C. The number quoted is literally 100% of Apples revenue. Which is an 'interesting' discrepancy.

Comment by SV_BubbleTime 13 hours ago

Something is off because obviously Amazon distribution is majority direct to consumer.

Comment by quickthrowman 13 hours ago

FTA: 3) Retailer percentages are margin only as sales otherwise are pass-through

They’re only counting margin from Amazon’s retail operations since they’re reselling products manufactured by others and Amazon’s retail net margins are ~3%.

Apple’s TTM net margin on their combined products and services is ~28%

Comment by thenewnewguy 13 hours ago

That's ... not what revenue means. You can't count revenue for Apple and profits for Amazon and Walmart etc.

Comment by quickthrowman 13 hours ago

I’m not defending their analysis, I’m just explaining it. Their reasoning is that Amazon and Walmart resell products manufactured by others for a low margin of 3-5%.

I agree with you, I think it would be more fair and less disingenuous to compare the net income of Apple vs the net income for consumer facing operations of other companies.

Comment by fsckboy 13 hours ago

Amazon draws a lot of it's revenue from AWS/Cloud services, i.e. not consumer, and only some from sales of low margin consumer goods.

Apple gets the bulk of it's revenue from high margin consumer devices, apps, and consumer subscription plans etc.

Comment by AnotherGoodName 13 hours ago

AWS/cloud is 18% of it's revenue. I don't get people in here trying to claim that it's consumer revenue is a small portion. Profits from AWS are high but this is revenue, the thing you count every time a sale is made on amazon.com.

Comment by uncivilized 12 hours ago

This comment being at the top just goes to show how the HN crowd is no different than any other on social media. Bro didn’t care to even read the article.

Comment by wolttam 13 hours ago

The difference is that Amazon’s to-consumer revenue is very low (~5%) while Apple’s is very high (~95%)

Comment by AnotherGoodName 13 hours ago

Amazon's to consumer revenue should include it's online stores (262billion), sales of third party products (172billion), physical stores (22.56billion), and i think subscription right (amazing prime, 50billion)?

Where do you get 5% from? That again doesn't pass the smell test.

Comment by Normal_gaussian 13 hours ago

Amazons b2c is Alexa, Kindle, Video, Music, Store, Whole Foods and a bunch more. Its revenue is about 350b annually, just shy of half their revenue.

Comment by mrDmrTmrJ 13 hours ago

Claiming that Meta's revenue is 0% consumer is something... (Why do advertisers pay Meta???)

Showing Alphabet's revenue by % of total revenue, as opposed to bar charts breaking out revenue by division, is chart crime.

I like apple and Asymco. But this is post 'How to lie with statistics 101.' Meaningfully lowers my opinion of Asymco

Comment by matthewfcarlson 13 hours ago

If the argument is that this is money that consumers give the company, yes- most people give meta very little money. That seems reasonable to me. Some of the other logical leaps made in this article are less reasonable.

Comment by mrDmrTmrJ 13 hours ago

Which logical steps do you most dislike? (Sincerely interested)

Regarding Meta. The author clearly states, "To wit, if you want to gain exposure to consumers, own Apple."

How does Meta's stock not give investors direct exposure to net consumer spending - via advertising and the transitive property? (I say this as someone who doesn't own Meta stock directly)

Comment by AnotherGoodName 13 hours ago

>I like apple and Asymco

Wtf even is Asymco? This article is obviously terrible but looking around the site and i just feel it's all complete crap with a cadence of once a week similarly crap articles. $100/month subscription for this type of content? Wtf?

Comment by mrDmrTmrJ 13 hours ago

I used to be good a long, long time ago. (Like a decade back.) Clearly I haven't been paying attention and you're right!

Comment by criemen 13 hours ago

> A large number of companies offer 0% consumer exposure: Nvidia

I thought they're still selling gaming GPUs? What did I miss?

Comment by bigC5560 13 hours ago

True they do technically sell gaming GPUs however I believe Nvidia paid more in taxes than they made from their "gaming" sector. I say "gaming" because I believe they roll it in with other things in their "edge computing" category. All this is off the top of my head so it could be wrong. Here is their Q2 results if you are curious: https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/nvidia-announces-financia...

Comment by fedpost 13 hours ago

Also AMD and Micron? Yeah it's not huge but hand waving that doesn't give me confidence in the analysis

Comment by pdpi 13 hours ago

Nvidia doesn't really do B2C. They don't sell graphics cards to consumers, they sell GPUs to OEMs who build cards around them.

Comment by csh0 11 hours ago

They are out of stock right now, but in normal times Nvidia does seem to sell their “founder edition” cards direct to consumer.

https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/graphics-cards/50-serie...

Comment by ghaff 13 hours ago

High-end gamers are a pretty minor slice of any tech segment including NVIDIA's.

Comment by raisedbyninjas 13 hours ago

I don't think they sell direct. They sell chips to OEMs.

Comment by 13 hours ago

Comment by dumberquestions 13 hours ago

That feels like a technicality worth addressing.

Comment by dominostars 13 hours ago

They do sell direct but very little

Comment by SV_BubbleTime 13 hours ago

Founder Editions? Still contract but first part labeled?

Comment by 233mhz 13 hours ago

That's like <5% of their revenues

Comment by criemen 13 hours ago

But does it round to 0?

Comment by vee-kay 13 hours ago

[dead]

Comment by andsoitis 13 hours ago

The author appears to be comparing Apple's revenue against a measure closer to retailers' gross margins rather than their total consumer sales.

Comment by torben-friis 14 hours ago

The page doesn't load at the moment and yet this is getting 5 upvotes every refresh.

Is it bot-raised or are people voting based on just the title?

Comment by stuartd 13 hours ago

Loads just fine for me? iPad

Comment by torben-friis 13 hours ago

Uh. Still not working here for me, neither phone or desktop. Perhaps it's region locked or something.

Comment by crazygringo 13 hours ago

Loads fine for me, before and now.

Might be a problem with your location, VPN, etc.

Comment by prewett 13 hours ago

The author doesn't understand Berkshire Hathaway. They have lots of consumer companies, GEICO being a large one, also a manufactured home manufacturer, See's Candies (not large by revenue, though), a furniture retailer, etc. A fair amount of Berkshire's revenue also comes from dividends from consumer companies, like Coca-Cola and Apple. Buffett's investing principle was to only purchase companies with predictable revenue streams, which has a certain mature consumer-company nature to it.

Comment by AndrewKemendo 13 hours ago

I stopped thinking about Apple as a technology company when I realized they ACTIVELY fast follow instead of being pioneers in fundamental technology.

I don’t think that’s an insult or bad, if anything it makes them more reliable as a company because they ride the wave of technological advancement rather than on the leading edge.

That’s a really great position as long as you have no ego about being the first - and they repeat over and and over that are THE BEST not the first.

Being third for 100 years beats being first for 40 years and Apple has the Middle Kingdom strategy

Comment by mrDmrTmrJ 13 hours ago

Apple and Meta are 2nd movers par excellence

Comment by ghaff 13 hours ago

Apple's a complicated story because they were arguably 2nd movers to some of the other early hobbyist PC entrants. But their history is so convoluted at this point that I'd hesitate to construct a narrative that wasn't book length at this point.

Comment by AndrewKemendo 13 hours ago

Agreed. After a long time in tech the first movers almost always get killed

In fact most people aren’t even aware of most first movers cause they shut down or get acquired and their tech get absorbed into some giant conglomerate

Comment by thingfyi 13 hours ago

> When looking at other large companies today, I noted that most of them are focused on selling to institutions rather than consumers.

This really shows that one that owns the consumer devices has a big leverage to play even in the age of AI - the entry to almost everything.