HomeWorld NewsOpinion: $1.4 trillion ? Big Tech’s pandemic year produces mind-boggling financial results

Opinion: $1.4 trillion ? Big Tech’s pandemic year produces mind-boggling financial results

  • February 6, 2022
  • Posted by: Bastion team
  • Category: World News
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Big Tech headed into 2021 with more than nine months of pandemic experience, but were still surprised by the extent of supply-chain disruptions, labor shortages and rising prices.

Despite these challenges, their financial performance has been staggering: Google parent Alphabet Inc.
GOOGL,
+0.14%
GOOG,
+0.26%,
Amazon.com Inc.
AMZN,
+13.54%,
Apple Inc.
AAPL,
-0.17%,
Facebook parent Meta Platforms Inc.
FB,
-0.28%
and Microsoft Corp.
MSFT,
+1.56%
individually and collectively put up record profit and revenue all around in 2021.

Collectively, the companies topped $1.4 trillion in revenue — which would rank 13th in gross domestic product as a nation, just behind Brazil and ahead of Australia, according to World Bank figures — and they generated $320 billion in profit based on Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP).

For some context on that profit figure: Apple, the most valuable company in U.S. history thanks to a series of amazing profits, took 37 years as a public company — 1980 through 2017 — to collect that much profit in total. Yet the iPhone manufacturer contributed the largest portion of 2021’s technology sector profit, topping $100 billion for the first time, a figure that itself eclipses the total profit Apple collected in its first three decades on the market.

Make no mistake, this is…

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