Which Company Can Reach $1 Trillion After Facebook? Here’s Our Guess.
Late last month,
Facebook
notched what could be its most notable achievement yet: Its market value hit $1 trillion. Just five U.S.-listed companies have reached the $1 trillion mark—or 0.08% of the total number of stocks currently traded on the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq. That’s roughly the odds of a high school basketball player making the National Basketball Association. It’s an elite club.
Now that Facebook (ticker: FB) has earned access—its market cap was down slightly by the end of the week, to $980 billion—we might be waiting a while for the next entrant. That’s partly because the federal government wants to rein in big business, but also because the current trillion-dollar members have a natural incentive to keep the club small.
There’s a big drop-off to the next candidate for membership—call it the Trillion-Dollar Cliff. Among U.S.-listed companies,
Tesla
(TSLA) is next up, with a market value of $629 billion, followed by
Berkshire Hathaway
(BRK.A),
Alibaba Group Holding
(BABA),
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing
(TSM), and
Visa
(V).
We’ve covered all of those stocks closely at Barron’s, and I’ve spent the past few weeks talking to colleagues about which company might be next. I’ve also queried sources and polled readers of our daily Review & Preview newsletter.
A few names get repeated mentions: Tesla,
Nvidia
(NVDA), Visa, and
JPMorgan Chase
(JPM), each of which are worth at least $400 billion.
Shopify
(SHOP) got a less obvious mention. The company is way down the market-value rank at $182 billion. It has become something of the anti-
Amazon,
providing bricks-and-mortar vendors and other businesses with easy e-commerce tools. While
Amazon.com
(AMZN) seeks to fend off regulation and a potential breakup, Shopify can keep its head down and continue to recruit new business.
I’ll place my bets on Visa getting to $1 trillion next, even if it takes a while. The company is closely tied to the economic recovery, since it gets a cut of transactions that run through its global electronic-payments network.
The business, which is part tech and part financial services, has a long tailwind as cash usage declines around the world. Visa shares have returned an annualized 28% over the past decade. If that pattern holds, Visa would reach $1 trillion by 2024.
While the next trillion-dollar stock is clearly a guessing game, one thing is clear: Large numbers have been no impediment to future gains.
Apple
(AAPL) has returned an annualized 44% since it became the first U.S.-listed company to reach a $1 trillion value in August 2018. The stock closed at a record this past week, giving it a market value of $2.4 trillion.
| Company / Ticker | Market Value (bil) |
|---|---|
| Apple / AAPL | $2,390 |
| Microsoft / MSFT | 2,089 |
| Amazon.com / AMZN | 1,882 |
| Alphabet / GOOGL | 1,703 |
| Facebook / FB | 980 |
| Tesla / TSLA | 629 |
| Berkshire Hathaway / BRK.A | 626 |
| Alibaba Group Holding / BABA | 551 |
| Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing / TSM | 544 |
| Visa / V | 505 |
| Nvidia / NVDA | 496 |
| JPMorgan Chase / JPM | 457 |
| Johnson & Johnson / JNJ | 445 |
| Walmart / WMT | 391 |
| UnitedHealth Group / UNH | 387 |
Note: U.S.-listed stocks only
Source: FactSet
I asked Denise Chisholm, Fidelity’s sector strategist, if the so-called law of large numbers would ever kick in. “Size is not particularly predictive one way or the other,” she says. “The S&P information technology, as a percent of overall S&P, is now in excess of 20%. Does that have any meaning on whether or not that group or that sector can outperform in the future? The answer really is no.”
Right now, the trillion-dollar members have momentum on their side. “A ball in motion tends to stay in motion,” she says.
Tech’s secret sauce has been continuously expanding profit margins, with valuations that are essentially in line with their historic norms. Operating margins for the S&P 500’s information technology sector have doubled in the past 15 years, to a recent 21%, according to Yardeni Research, while overall S&P 500 margins have been static at 10% or so (excluding a collapse during the financial crisis).
Tech’s magic—and those trillion-dollar club passes—are now hitting up against the increased likelihood of regulation. “The sheer fact of the headline of the trillion-dollar club is going to bring even more regulation,” says Jim Paulsen, chief investment officer of The Leuthold Group.
On Friday, the Biden administration signed an executive order that calls for a “whole-of-government effort to promote competition in the American economy.” The order, which consists of 72 initiatives, is simultaneously broad and narrow. It pushes against consolidation while also addressing consumer pain points, like early-termination fees for broadband services, hard-to-fix consumer devices, and airline baggage fees.
By now, the Biden administration recognizes that tech regulation isn’t a slam dunk with the public. Despite unease around data and privacy practices, less than half of U.S. adults are in favor of more tech regulation, according to a 2020 Pew Research poll.
A room at the F8 Developers Conference in San Jose, Calif.
David Paul Morris/Bloomberg
Privacy regulation is politically complicated, especially if it means reining in the advertising that enables free services like social media, internet search, and email. But there isn’t much controversial about limiting broadband charges or making it easier to fix a smartphone battery. The White House seems to be attacking companies where it hurts—their mixed record of customer service.
For now, investors continue to generally overlook regulation. All five members of the trillion-dollar club were either higher or flat on Friday in the wake of Biden’s executive order.
It’s time to take regulation more seriously, says Ed Yardeni, president of Yardeni Research. “A trillion here, a trillion there attracts a lot of attention from politicians.”
Write to Alex Eule at alex.eule@barrons.com
Today, we are releasing Facebook Graph API v18.0 and Marketing API v18.0. As part of this release, we are highlighting changes below that we believe are relevant to parts of our developer community. These changes include announcements, product updates, and notifications on deprecations that we believe are relevant to your application(s)’ integration with our platform.
For a complete list of all changes and their details, please visit our changelog.
General Updates
Consolidation of Audience Location Status Options for Location Targeting
As previously announced in May 2023, we have consolidated Audience Location Status to our current default option of “People living in or recently in this location” when choosing the type of audience to reach within their Location Targeting selections. This update reflects a consolidation of other previously available options and removal of our “People traveling in this location” option.
We are making this change as part of our ongoing efforts to deliver more value to businesses, simplify our ads system, and streamline our targeting options in order to increase performance efficiency and remove options that have low usage.
This update will apply to new or duplicated campaigns. Existing campaigns created prior to launch will not be entered in this new experience unless they are in draft mode or duplicated.
Add “add_security_recommendation” and “code_expiration_minutes” to WA Message Templates API
Earlier this year, we released WhatsApp’s authentication solution which enabled creating and sending authentication templates with native buttons and preset authentication messages. With the release of Graph API v18, we’re making improvements to the retrieval of authentication templates, making the end-to-end authentication template process easier for BSPs and businesses.
With Graph API v18, BSPs and businesses can have better visibility into preset authentication message template content after creation. Specifically, payloads will return preset content configuration options, in addition to the text used by WhatsApp. This improvement can enable BSPs and businesses to build “edit” UIs for authentication templates that can be constructed on top of the API.
Note that errors may occur when upgrading to Graph API v18 if BSPs or businesses are taking the entire response from the GET request and providing it back to the POST request to update templates. To resolve, the body/header/footer text fields should be dropped before passing back into the API.
Re-launching dev docs and changelogs for creating Call Ads
- Facebook Reels Placement for Call Ads
Meta is releasing the ability to deliver Call Ads through the Facebook Reels platform. Call ads allow users to call businesses in the moment of consideration when they view an ad, and help businesses drive more complex discussions with interested users. This is an opportunity for businesses to advertise with call ads based on peoples’ real-time behavior on Facebook. Under the Ad set Level within Ads Manager, businesses can choose to add “Facebook Reels” Under the Placements section. - Re-Launching Call Ads via API
On September 12, 2023, we’re providing updated guidance on how to create Call Ads via the API. We are introducing documentation solely for Call Ads, so that 3P developers can more easily create Call Ads’ campaigns and know how to view insights about their ongoing call ad campaigns, including call-related metrics. In the future, we also plan to support Call Add-ons via our API platform. Developers should have access to the general permissions necessary to create general ads in order to create Call Ads via the API platform.Please refer to developer documentation for additional information.
Deprecations & Breaking Changes
Graph API changes for user granular permission feature
We are updating two graph API endpoints for WhatsAppBusinessAccount. These endpoints are as follows:
- Retrieve message templates associated with WhatsAppBusiness Account
- Retrieve phone numbers associated with WhatsAppBusiness Account
With v18, we are rolling out a new feature “user granular permission”. All existing users who are already added to WhatsAppBusinessAccount will be backfilled and will continue to have access (no impact).
The admin has the flexibility to change these permissions. If the admin changes the permission and removes access to view message templates or phone numbers for one of their users, that specific user will start getting an error message saying you do not have permission to view message templates or phone numbers on all versions v18 and older.
Deprecate legacy metrics naming for IG Media and User Insights
Starting on September 12, Instagram will remove duplicative and legacy, insights metrics from the Instagram Graph API in order to share a single source of metrics to our developers.
This new upgrade reduces any confusion as well as increases the reliability and quality of our reporting.
After 90 days of this launch (i.e. December 11, 2023), we will remove all these duplicative and legacy insights metrics from the Instagram Graph API on all versions in order to be more consistent with the Instagram app.
We appreciate all the feedback that we’ve received from our developer community, and look forward to continuing to work together.
Please review the media insights and user insights developer documentation to learn more.
Deprecate all Facebook Wi-Fi v1 and Facebook Wi-Fi v2 endpoints
Facebook Wi-Fi was designed to improve the experience of connecting to Wi-Fi hotspots at businesses. It allowed a merchant’s customers to get free Wi-Fi simply by checking in on Facebook. It also allowed merchants to control who could use their Wi-Fi and for how long, and integrated with ads to enable targeting to customers who had used the merchant’s Wi-Fi. This product was deprecated on June 12, 2023. As the partner notice period has ended, all endpoints used by Facebook Wi-Fi v1 and Facebook Wi-Fi v2 have been deprecated and removed.
API Version Deprecations:
As part of Facebook’s versioning schedule for Graph API and Marketing API, please note the upcoming deprecations:
Graph API
- September 14, 2023: Graph API v11.0 will be deprecated and removed from the platform
- February 8, 2024: Graph API v12.0 will be deprecated and removed from the platform
- May 28, 2024: Graph API v13.0 will be deprecated and removed from the platform
Marketing API
- September 20, 2023: Marketing API v14.0 will be deprecated and removed from the platform
- September 20, 2023: Marketing API v15.0 will be deprecated and removed from the platform
- February 06, 2024: Marketing API v16.0 will be deprecated and removed from the platform
To avoid disruption to your business, we recommend migrating all calls to the latest API version that launched today.
Facebook Platform SDK
As part of our 2-year deprecation schedule for Platform SDKs, please note the upcoming deprecations and sunsets:
- October 2023: Facebook Platform SDK v11.0 or below will be sunset
- February 2024: Facebook Platform SDK v12.0 or below will be sunset
First seen at developers.facebook.com
Before today (August 28, 2023), advertisers could not promote images and/or videos used in Instagram Stories as ads via the Instagram Marketing API. This process created unwanted friction for our partners and their customers.
After consistently hearing about this pain point from our developer community, we have removed this unwanted friction for advertisers and now allow users to seamlessly promote their image and/or video media used in Instagram Stories as ads via the Instagram Marketing API as of August 28, 2023.
We appreciate all the feedback received from our developer community, and hope to continue improving your experience.
Please review the developer documentation to learn more.
First seen at developers.facebook.com
Launching second release of Facebook Reels API: An enterprise solution for desktop and web publishers
We’re excited to announce that the second release of FB Reels API is now publicly available for third-party developers. FB Reels API enables users of third-party platforms to share Reels directly to public Facebook Pages and the New Pages Experience.
FB Reels API has grown significantly since the first release in September 2022. The new version of the APIs now support custom thumbnails, automatic music tagging, tagging collaborators, longer format of reels and better error handling.
FB Reels API will also support scheduling and draft capability to allow creators to take advantage of tools provided either by Meta or by our partners. Based on the feedback we received from our partners, we’ll now provide additional audio insights via the Audio Recommendations API and reels performance metrics via the Insights API.
Our goal in the next couple of releases is to continue to make it easier for creators to develop quality content by adding features like early copyright detection and A/B testing. We’re also excited to start working on enhanced creation features like Video clipping- so stay tuned to hear more about those features in the future.
Call-to-Action
If you are a developer interested in integrating with the Facebook Reels API, please refer to the Developer Documents for more info.
Not sure if this product is for you? Check out our entire suite of sharing offerings.
Tune in to Product @scale event to learn more about FB Video APIs and hear from some of our customers.
First seen at developers.facebook.com
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