8 comments

  • AnotherGoodName 19 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?

    • pdpi 19 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.
      • A_D_E_P_T 19 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.

        • _diyar 19 hours ago
          60% is online stores. Is that known as B2C?
          • unsnap_biceps 18 hours ago
            B2C: Business to Consumer

            B2B: Business to Business

            • _diyar 18 hours ago
              Yea thanks, but I know. The question is whether the online store revenue is mainly from consumers or businesses.
              • AnotherGoodName 17 hours ago
                Well considering this article counted exactly 100% of Apples revenue as B2C its clearly an inconsistent definition.
          • maattdd 19 hours ago
            Of course.
      • jonas21 19 hours ago
        The same table also lists Walmart as 5% B2C revenue. There's clearly something wrong here.
        • indosauros 19 hours ago
          They're not accounting for the Walmart Cloud Servers I run my business on
      • AnotherGoodName 18 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.
      • SV_BubbleTime 19 hours ago
        Something is off because obviously Amazon distribution is majority direct to consumer.
    • quickthrowman 19 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%

      • thenewnewguy 19 hours ago
        That's ... not what revenue means. You can't count revenue for Apple and profits for Amazon and Walmart etc.
        • quickthrowman 19 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.

    • fsckboy 19 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.

      • AnotherGoodName 19 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.
    • uncivilized 18 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.
    • wolttam 19 hours ago
      The difference is that Amazon’s to-consumer revenue is very low (~5%) while Apple’s is very high (~95%)
      • AnotherGoodName 19 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.

      • Normal_gaussian 19 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.
  • mrDmrTmrJ 19 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

    • matthewfcarlson 19 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.
      • mrDmrTmrJ 19 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)

    • AnotherGoodName 19 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?

      • mrDmrTmrJ 19 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!
  • criemen 19 hours ago
    > A large number of companies offer 0% consumer exposure: Nvidia

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

    • bigC5560 19 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...
    • fedpost 19 hours ago
      Also AMD and Micron? Yeah it's not huge but hand waving that doesn't give me confidence in the analysis
    • pdpi 19 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.
    • ghaff 19 hours ago
      High-end gamers are a pretty minor slice of any tech segment including NVIDIA's.
    • raisedbyninjas 19 hours ago
      I don't think they sell direct. They sell chips to OEMs.
      • dumberquestions 19 hours ago
        That feels like a technicality worth addressing.
      • dominostars 19 hours ago
        They do sell direct but very little
      • SV_BubbleTime 19 hours ago
        Founder Editions? Still contract but first part labeled?
    • 233mhz 19 hours ago
      That's like <5% of their revenues
      • criemen 18 hours ago
        But does it round to 0?
    • vee-kay 19 hours ago
      [dead]
  • andsoitis 19 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.
  • torben-friis 19 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?

    • stuartd 19 hours ago
      Loads just fine for me? iPad
      • torben-friis 19 hours ago
        Uh. Still not working here for me, neither phone or desktop. Perhaps it's region locked or something.
    • crazygringo 19 hours ago
      Loads fine for me, before and now.

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

  • prewett 19 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.
  • AndrewKemendo 19 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

    • mrDmrTmrJ 19 hours ago
      Apple and Meta are 2nd movers par excellence
      • ghaff 19 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.
      • AndrewKemendo 19 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

  • thingfyi 19 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.