Hardware Companies Are Worth More than Software Companies

Over the last few days I’ve been getting ready to present at the Webrazzi technology conference in Istanbul, Turkey.  As part of my preparation, I took a look at the global top 20 technology companies, organized by public market capitalization - shown in the picture above.  Collectively, these companies have a market capitalization of roughly $2.7 trillion dollars.  I broke these 20 companies into four categories – hardware, software, services, and retailers.

It turns out that hardware companies represent 54% of the $2.7 trillion of market capitalization.  In fact, even if you remove Apple from this analysis, hardware still accounts for $858 billion of market value, significantly more than the $779 billion for the software companies in this list.

So why aren’t there more hardware startups being formed?  My view is that is changing fast, thanks to recent advances in technology, manufacturing, and social media - and it’s the topic of my talk at Webrazzi on Thursday.