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Yes, there are very few major east coast HQ'd tech companies.
As your chart shows, the Bay Area is leaps and bounds ahead of everywhere else, and while your chart doesn't show it, Boston is mostly biotech. It also doesn't show private valuations, which are higher in the Bay Area than elsewhere.
Venture capital is an indicator of who MIGHT SOMEDAY BECOME a tech hub.
For the last 30 years, through all kinds of ups and downs, the Bay Area has represented 40% of VC raised and a higher share of valuations. There are no other real HQ tech hubs, just outposts of Bay Area companies like Austin. Seattle is the only other place that has developed $100B companies, but it has two.
Boston and San Diego are biotech hubs, and have been for 40 years. Raleigh/Durham has a life sciences industry, but very few biotech startups. DC has NIH, but also few biotech startups.
There are 27 tech companies founded in the last 50 years with market caps over $50B. All were founded or are based in the Bay Area except Microsoft and Amazon in Seattle, and Qualcomm and Broadcom which are based in SoCal.
There's no trend to suggest any new tech hubs are emerging other than places were Bay Area companies are opening branch offices.
You could also note that the four areas in the trillions are all either expensive (CA), northern (IL), or both (WA, NY), and that speaks to the top corporations going where highly-paid people like to work and can be more successful.
Illinois isn't above a trillion, Texas is. So are you saying Texas is a place where highly-paid people like to work and can be more successful?
While market cap is interesting, it’s by its very nature tech-skewed. I imagine a map of top companies by revenue would look vastly different.
Tech, oil and semiconductors have a lot of investors right now so that’s where market cap will skew. Banking took a big hit in the last few months so lots of decrease there. Biotech had a huge spike during covid and a big dip soon after. However, even tech had a big pull back, so there’s a lot that we’re 100B that no longer are. Companies that aren’t super big but are in a “hot” industry will have a higher valuation than their size in comparison to other industries.
If you’re looking at biggest companies, revenue would be the place to go (which is the Fortune 500 list). If you’re looking at most successful, net income would be a better indicator.
This list will consistently look very different. If you take it down to $50B in cap, it would look even more different consistently.
20 years from now, the most valuable companies will be based in the West Coast. No one here cares how long you've been at your current job, what you wear to work, or who you know. Listen to CNBC and it might as well be the Bay Area Business Show. The East Coast, and especially the South, are awful at innovation.
I wouldn't say that. A lot of the tech guys went to the Ivy's (Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, etc.) It's just the bay area has most of the venture capital, so people set up shop there. I have a friend who went to high school with one of the Airbnb founders. He grew up in Atlanta, went northeast for school and relocated to the west coast because of the venture capital and the hotbed of tech companies. It's not like people who aren't innovative go to Ivy League schools, Duke, Georgia Tech, Vanderbilt, Emory, MIT, etc.
Tech, oil and semiconductors have a lot of investors right now so that’s where market cap will skew. Banking took a big hit in the last few months so lots of decrease there. Biotech had a huge spike during covid and a big dip soon after. However, even tech had a big pull back, so there’s a lot that we’re 100B that no longer are. Companies that aren’t super big but are in a “hot” industry will have a higher valuation than their size in comparison to other industries.
If you’re looking at biggest companies, revenue would be the place to go (which is the Fortune 500 list). If you’re looking at most successful, net income would be a better indicator.
This list will consistently look very different. If you take it down to $50B in cap, it would look even more different consistently.
In 1989, 13 of the top 20 market cap companies in the world were Japanese (the highest being the Industrial Bank of Japan at $104 billion). Right now, some of these companies like Tesla and Nvidia have crazy PE ratios... Nvidia is 200x PE. These things were unheard of 30 years ago. I made a good chunk of change investing in Tesla pre-covid and cashing out 2021 but I regret not doing the same with Nvidia. I even said to someone that Nvidia would one day hit a trillion-dollar market cap when it was around a 50 billion dollar market cap.
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