Sacre Bleu! Microsoft Just Overtook France’s GDP

When Microsoft’s market value cruised past the $3 trillion mark last week, the company also eased past the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of one of the ten most productive nations on the planet.

When we first heard about Apple, then Microsoft reaching this formidable milestone, I think the prevailing impression was that of “okay, that’s amazing, it had to happen, it had to be a tech company in this day and age…” kind of thing.

Our mental measuring tools of how big $3 trillion actually is, are based in the world of commerce. But now we have a statistic comparative to a sovereign state of almost 68 million people. Apple isn’t far behind either. One more successful product upgrade and Voilà! Au revoir, La Belle France. Next stop, La Grande-Bretagne, whose GDP stands at $3.3 trillion.

This isn’t valuable information that you can do anything with, I concede.

But it does sort of recalibrate how us ordinary folk view sovereign and commercial wealth. Also, just how ubiquitous these two brands are, with over a billion people reliant on either or both.

Above France and the United Kingdom in GDP terms is India, Japan, Germany, China and the United States at the top with $29 trillion.

But Microsoft and Apple are not the only companies with markets caps bigger than countries with one trillion+ GDPs.

Saudi Aramco, the Kingdom’s giant energy company which is also the world’s largest oil exporter, comes in with a market capitalization of $2.1 trillion, higher than Russia’s GDP.

Alphabet, Google’s parent, has a market cap of $1.85 trillion, nudging aside Mexico at $1.81 trillion.

Amazon’s $1.6 trillion tops the domestic product of Mexico.

Software and processor company Nvidia has a market cap of $1.47 trillion just pips the GDP of Indonesia.

With the exception of Saudi Aramco, the other five companies are based in America.

It’s going to be fascinating to see how this commercial/geopolitical landscape changes over the next few years.

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