Apple captures 50% of consumer revenue of the top half of the S&P 500(asymco.com)
65 pointsby zdw2 hours ago8 comments
  • AnotherGoodNamean hour 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?

    • pdpian hour 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_Tan hour ago
        It's WAY off, lol

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

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

        • _diyaran hour ago
          60% is online stores. Is that known as B2C?
          • maattddan hour ago
            Of course.
          • unsnap_biceps33 minutes ago
            B2C: Business to Consumer

            B2B: Business to Business

            • _diyar26 minutes ago
              Yea thanks, but I know. The question is whether the online store revenue is mainly from consumers or businesses.
        • an hour ago
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      • jonas21an hour ago
        The same table also lists Walmart as 5% B2C revenue. There's clearly something wrong here.
        • indosaurosan hour ago
          They're not accounting for the Walmart Cloud Servers I run my business on
      • AnotherGoodName27 minutes 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_BubbleTimean hour ago
        Something is off because obviously Amazon distribution is majority direct to consumer.
    • quickthrowmanan hour 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%

      • thenewnewguyan hour ago
        That's ... not what revenue means. You can't count revenue for Apple and profits for Amazon and Walmart etc.
        • quickthrowmanan hour 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.

    • uncivilized4 minutes ago
      This comment being at the top just goes to show how the HN crowd is no different than any other social media. Bro didn’t care to even read the article.
    • fsckboyan hour 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.

      • AnotherGoodNamean hour 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.
    • wolttaman hour ago
      The difference is that Amazon’s to-consumer revenue is very low (~5%) while Apple’s is very high (~95%)
      • AnotherGoodNamean hour 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_gaussianan hour 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.
  • mrDmrTmrJan hour 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

    • matthewfcarlsonan hour 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.
      • mrDmrTmrJan hour 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)

    • AnotherGoodNamean hour 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?

      • mrDmrTmrJan hour 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!
  • criemenan hour ago
    > A large number of companies offer 0% consumer exposure: Nvidia

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

    • bigC5560an hour 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...
    • fedpostan hour ago
      Also AMD and Micron? Yeah it's not huge but hand waving that doesn't give me confidence in the analysis
    • pdpian hour 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.
    • ghaffan hour ago
      High-end gamers are a pretty minor slice of any tech segment including NVIDIA's.
    • raisedbyninjasan hour ago
      I don't think they sell direct. They sell chips to OEMs.
      • an hour ago
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      • dumberquestionsan hour ago
        That feels like a technicality worth addressing.
      • dominostarsan hour ago
        They do sell direct but very little
      • SV_BubbleTimean hour ago
        Founder Editions? Still contract but first part labeled?
    • 233mhzan hour ago
      That's like <5% of their revenues
      • criemen41 minutes ago
        But does it round to 0?
    • vee-kayan hour ago
      [dead]
  • andsoitisan hour 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-friisan hour 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?

    • stuartdan hour ago
      Loads just fine for me? iPad
      • torben-friisan hour ago
        Uh. Still not working here for me, neither phone or desktop. Perhaps it's region locked or something.
    • crazygringoan hour ago
      Loads fine for me, before and now.

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

  • prewettan hour 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.
  • thingfyian hour 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.

  • AndrewKemendoan hour 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

    • mrDmrTmrJan hour ago
      Apple and Meta are 2nd movers par excellence
      • ghaffan hour 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.
      • AndrewKemendoan hour 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