Apple vs Amazon vs The World: Trillions, billions and 108,000% gains

Let’s do this week’s Live Q&A Chat in the Trading With Cody Chat Room at 9am ET tomorrow (Tuesday) morning. But first, here’s some how-do-they-compare analysis that I like to do sometimes to keep my head around the size of some very important numbers which can yield some fascinating analysis.

Apple vs Amazon vs The World

• Total global Gross World Product (GWP) (essentially GDP) will be close to $90 trillion in 2018.
• Total US Gross Domestic Product (GDP) will be close to $20 trillion in 2018.
• Apple’s market cap is $1 trillion (equivalent to about 5% of the US economy)
• Amazon’s market cap is $900 billion (equivalent to about of the 1% of the whole world’s entire economic activity).
• Apple will probably do close to $276 billion in sales in 2019, up from $263 billion this year (equivalent to more than 1% of the US GDP or 1 cent of every dollar*  — *Interestingly, much of Apple’s sales outside of US probably wouldn’t be counted as “Domestic” in GDP, just as as an FYI).
• Amazon will probably do close to $286 billion in sales in 2019, up from $234 billion this year (Amazon is now generating revenues the equivalent to nearly than 1.5% of the total US GDP** — ** And unlike Apple, almost all of Amazon’s revenue is generated in the US).
• Apple will buyback more than $100 billion of AAPL shares this year and issue close to $15 billion in dividend payments to shareholders this year (equivalent to about 0.6% of US GDP).
• Amazon hasn’t bought back a share of AMZN in years and probably won’t this year either. No dividends in sight either.
• Apple’s expected to generate close to $70 billion in profits in 2019, up from close to $60 billion in profit this year.
• Amazon’s expected to generate close to $13 billion in profits in 2019, up from close to $9 billion in profit this year.
• Apple is up about 51,000% since its IPO 38 years ago for an 18% annualized gain.
• Amazon is up about 108,000% since its IPO 21 years ago for an 40% annualized gain.
• Apple has almost 5 billion shares outstanding.
• Amazon has almost 500 million shares outstanding.
• Apple has Siri, which sucks.
• Amazon has Alexa, which has become the de facto standard platform of The Voice Revolution.

I own both stocks (and Alexa and Siri) and have owned both stocks for a long time (and Alexa ans Siri) and plan to keep on holding most of my shares of each (I don’t plan to use Siri much anytime soon, but I use Alexa many times most days).

On a related note, this headline about how Goldman Sachs expects our stock market to get $1 trillion boost via buybacks underscores how more than 1% of the world’s total gross economic activity (revenues, topline!) will be spent buying back global corporation’s stocks this year. If net earnings from that $90 trillion in global economy is probably at best 10% (the S&P 500’s average profit margin is 11%), that would mean that global corporations will spend the equivalent of than 10% of the world’s profits on buybacks.

So I’ll see you bright and early for this week’s Live Q&A Chat in the Trading With Cody Chat Room at 9am ET tomorrow (Tuesday) morning.Here’s some valuable commentary from the chat room community from over the weekend and this morning: