In this article we are going to list the 15 largest electronics companies in the world. Click to skip ahead and jump to the 5 largest electronics companies in the world.
The electronics industry, especially when compared to other classic established industries such as coal, oil and gas, FMCG and various other industries, is relatively a much newer industry. The industry was only established in the 20th century and has grown exponentially over the last few decades. It is also by far one of the biggest industries in the world, with several different sectors including the semiconductor industry, which is basically the driving force of the entire electronics industry, and in 2018, had sales of over $481 billion at a global level.
The industry itself is worth trillions of dollars and is one of the fastest growing industries in the world. We do distinguish it from other similar industries such as the ecommerce industry which is slightly different and while the two are related and linked, they are not the same. To learn more about ecommerce industries, you might want to consider taking a look at the largest ecommerce companies in the world. Nowadays, even if you look around you, electronics have dominated our life like perhaps nothing else. And a lot of this has to do with the advancements in technology made in the last several decades which have literally completely changed the industry and our lives, without any exaggeration at all. While electronic products initially were bulky, heavy, unaesthetic, and extremely expensive, and hence not suitable for common purposes. The simplest of devices with specifications that would make you wonder how anything was even accomplished on them would cost thousands of dollars. A 5 MB hard disk was huge and weighed nearly a ton, taking up 16 square feet of space. The cost of using this device ran up to $35,000 annually, which is absolutely staggering. Today, 1 TB hard drives will cost you a lot less than $100. SSDs might be slightly more expensive but still not even close to the astronomical cost of days gone by. Even if we talk about televisions, you can now get a 55 inch 4k TV for a little over $500 from the biggest brands, which again is immense. If you told anyone in the 60s that you would have such incredible resolution available, they would have either laughed at you or been really, really progressive.
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Smartphones are perhaps however, the best example to show the growth of the electronics industry. A handheld device now has more power than most laptops did less than a decade ago and is equipped with cameras that have completely made the digital camera industry go obsolete. And while a very small percentage of the population owned a smartphone, only perhaps the super rich, due to low costs and several options, smartphones are now the most common type of phone and have seen the establishment of a new industry and its subsequent explosion in growth when apps for phones started to be created. The biggest apps earn tens of millions of dollars in revenue. All this serves to show how intrinsically so many other industries are linked to the electronics industry and its growth, and how the growth of one sector impacts everything else as well.
Of course, like more or less every single industry in the world bar a few, the electronics industry has also been severely affected by the coronavirus pandemic. The pandemic has infected over 57 million people while causing nearly 1.4 million deaths and resulted in the lockdown of billions of people across the world, which saw many businesses shut down and some even having to close permanently. This led to many production facilities of electronic products also shutting down as the workforce across the globe has been unavailable. On the other hand, major ecommerce companies have been able to provide non-essential items including electronics, which have also seen an increase in demand as many people who are locked down resort to electronics products to while away the time while the world attempts to fight off the pandemic. Now that there are potentially successful vaccines by various pharma companies, some of which are among the biggest biotech companies in the world, maybe things will return to normal soon.
The largest electronics companies in the world are some of the most recognizable names in the world and have some of the world’s most popular products. In fact, one you go through the list, look around your house; you might actually find a lot of products of these companies in your house, I know I did. Together, these companies have over $950 billion in revenue, over a trillion dollars in assets and provide direct employment to nearly 3 million people. We have used revenues, profits, assets and employees and given higher weightage to the latter two metrics, to calculate our rankings. The data has been taken by the Fortune 500 Global List for 2020 and we have only taken the electronics companies appearing there. So let’s take a look at the companies providing our favorite products, without with our lives wouldn’t have as much color, starting with number 15:
15. Haier Smart Home
Total revenue in 2019 (in millions of dollars): 29,060
Total profit in 2019 (in millions of dollars): 1,188
Total assets in 2019 (in millions of dollars): 26,911
Total employees: 99,757
Haier Smart Home is engaged in, as the name suggests, in the production of a wide variety of home appliances and is considered to be the most valuable IoT ecosystem brand in the world with a value of $16.3 billion.
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