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Last week, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company Limited (NYSE: TSM), also known as TSMC, crossed an important psychological threshold for investors. The Taiwanese company surpassed a $1 trillion market capitalization, making it the first Asian company to do so since Chinas PetroChina oil and gas giant briefly achieved this milestone in 2007, notes GuruFocus. TSMC manufactures the most advanced computer chips in the world, which are essential for running the most complex AI tasks. The company makes chips for a variety of tech giants, including Nvidia and Apple. As of the time of this writing, TSMC has a market capitalization of approximately $1.2 trillion. The chipmaking giant has achieved this 12-figure valuation on the strength of its chip business in recent months, which has seen a surge in demand thanks to the artificial intelligence boom sweeping the world. But the question many people may be wondering now is whos next in line to join the $1 trillion club? Heres what the numbers say. Who is currently in the $1 trillion club? The list of companies valued at $1 trillion or more is pretty short. Currently, just 11 companies have a 12-figure valuation, according to data compiled by CompaniesMarketCap.com. The companies with trillion-dollar market caps currently include: Nvidia ($4.1 trillion) Microsoft ($3.7 trillion) Apple ($3.1 trillion) Amazon ($2.4 trillion) Alphabet/Google ($2.3 trillion) Meta Platforms ($1.7 trillion) Saudi Aramco ($1.6 trillion) Broadcom ($1.3 trillion) TSMC ($1.2 trillion) Tesla ($1 trillion) Berkshire Hathaway ($1 trillion) While TSMC is the newest member of this esteemed list, the company that tops the chart, Nvidia, is the most notable. Not only is it the most valuable company in the world, but it is also the only company to have ever reached a $4 trillion market capitalization, which it achieved earlier this month. What companies are closest to joining the trillion-dollar club? As its fairly hard to predict how the stock marketand individual stockswill perform in the future, its also nearly impossible to say with any certainty which company may be the next one to cross the trillion-dollar threshold. The companies that are the closest now could have calamity strike next week, and see their stock prices plunge as a result, taking them further from the 12-figure mark. Alternatively, a company that is worth only a few hundred billion now could strike metaphorical business gold next week, and see its share price surge catapulting it to the trillion-dollar club out of nowhere. But given that a companys market cap is defined by adding up the value of a companys total shares, its easy to see which companies are currently next closest in line to becoming a trillion-dollar giant. The following five companies that are closest based on their current stock prices are: JPMorgan Chase (Market Cap $800 billion) Walmart ($763 billion) Visa ($685 billion) Eli Lilly ($684 billion) Oracle ($684 billion) Banking giant JPMorgan Chase is the closest to a $1 trillion market cap. To reach it, it would only need to see its stock price rise by another 25% from current levels. Walmart would need to see its stock increase by about 31% from current levels. Visa, Eli Lilly, and Oracle would all need to see about a 46% jump in their stock prices to reach a $1 trillion market cap. As for some of Americas other tech giants, many would need to see their stock prices nearly double or triple from todays levels to reach a $1 trillion valuation. These companies include: Netflix (current valuation: $524 billion), SAP (current valuation: $358 billion), and Palantir (current valuation: $358 billion). For now, its unlikely that any of these companies will be hitting the $1 trillion threshold in the near future, which is precisely why TSMC joining the club is such a big deal. Even as the value of many of the worlds largest companies continues to surge, crossing the 12-figure mark is still a relative rarity.
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E-Commerce
Summer vacation season is here, but it may be the last time Americans can travel affordably by planeespecially if Delta has its way. As the worlds largest airline by annual revenue and the second-largest by passengers carried, Delta is a leader in the industry. Thats what makes its plans to use AI for ticket pricing so concerning. According to Delta President Glen Hauenstein, about one in five tickets the airline sells by years end will be priced by AI, up from just 3% today. Deltas long-term goal is to price all tickets this way. This is a full reengineering of how we price and how we will be pricing in the future, Hauenstein told investors in November 2024. While this may spell amazingly favorable unit revenues for the airline, its bad news for passengersmany of whom worry that price gouging will soon eclipse any notion of price personalization. The practice of dynamic pricing is certainly not new in the airline industry, says Kerry Tan, professor of economics at Loyola University Maryland. But with better data and evolving tech, he says, the increase in the usage of AI to price their flights raises important questions. Certainly Delta, as with any other company, is profit-driven, and stands to gain from this by better matching consumers willingness to pay to the price they pay for a flight. The fear is that Deltas size and influence will prompt othersboth airlines and companies in unrelated sectorsto follow suit. As an economist, we assume that companies are profit maximizers, and so in a way I see this as companies really making a push towards that objective of profit maximization, Tan says. But it also highlights how firms are increasingly willing to squeeze consumers for every penny. Thats why companies like Disney can implement variable pricing for perks like Lightning Lane passes, or why Las Vegas casinos continue to raise resort fees. Post-pandemic, the consumer environment has grown more hostile, from ubiquitous tipping prompts to ever-higher surcharges. Tan points to sports franchises pricing tickets dynamically depending on the quality of their opponentfor instance, Manchester United charging more when facing rivals like Liverpool than lesser-known teams like Everton. And its not just flights or football. I think certainly where possible companies are going to try to employ AI, Tan says. While grocery pricing might seem less vulnerable, he notes early signs of change. Some European chains already use digital shelf tags that update in real timelowering prices to reduce food waste but potentially able to raise them when demand spikes or a tracked customer walks in. Still, he adds, AI pricing makes more economic sense for big-ticket items like airfare than everyday goods like milk. Tim Quigley, a management professor at the University of Georgia, agrees, and sees how easily this kind of technology could spread. If they know theres an ad and a bunch of people in a city searching for a piece of hardware at Best Buy, maybe the price goes up, he says. Its those sorts of things AI can do without human intervention. Hotels may be next. What youre willing to pay to stay at a Marriott or a Hilton or some other hotel could be vastly different than my willingness to pay, Tan says. And if they can tap into that difference and charge you closer to what your willingness to pay is, theyre going to extract a lot more profits. Quigley warns this trend could lead to a miserable existence for consumers. This creeps in further into our lives with us being silent about it, he says. So I appreciate you reaching out and other journalists that have written about this issue and getting it to the forefront. For Quigley, the solution starts with protecting personal data. Companies are using this data in ways that you and I could have never imagined, he says. Maybe we ought to put some basic protections in place to say the customer, the individual[we] own our data.
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E-Commerce
Years ago, I spent a lot of time making the case for why IT mattered in large enterprises. Its fair to say the landscape has changeddramatically. Where I once had to argue for ITs strategic importance, I now find myself doing the oppositepushing back on the exuberant view that technology alone can fix everything from poorly designed processes to unclear roles and responsibilities. After decades of serving as essentialbut often backgroundenablers of enterprise strategy, technologists and our alphabet soup of leadership titles (CIOs, CDTOs, CDOs, CTOs) are now at the center of business transformation. In more than 30 years in this industry, I’ve never witnessed IT play such a central role in shaping business dynamics. With the tailwind of generative AI and automated code completion, technology teams are now leading what can only be described as “business as unusual”creating previously unimaginable products, services, business models, customer and partner relationships, and employee experiences. Today, tech strategy is business strategy. The Great Unbundling Begins The traditional way we think about enterprise software is being upended. Suddenly, it’s both cool and affordable to build genuinely useful things. For decades, CIOs were forced to manage constant trade-offs: lower total cost of ownership versus future-proofing, slick user interfaces versus seamless integration, best-of-breed solutions versus end-to-end platforms, on-premises versus cloud. The market subsequently converged to the point where most companies now run virtually identical application stacks. And yet, despite spending tens of millions on carefully crafted user interfaces, most employees still dislike using the enterprise software we provide. They use it because they must, not because they want to. At their core, most enterprise software platforms arent so different from the Excel spreadsheets my brother uses to run his small businessthey just come with multimillion-dollar interfaces layered on top. Whether its HR systems, data platforms, or CRMs, the underlying logic often mirrors the same basic workflows and decision trees. What sets them apart isnt complexityits scale, integration capability, and the stakes involved. To put it more bluntly, all of us are spending enormous sums on the equivalent of a car that boasts luxury exterior finishes but moves you along with the horsepower of a Yugo GV. Regardless of how nice the outside looks, the engine is what actually delivers impact and value. The AI-Powered Reconstruction The emergence of agentic AI is fundamentally disrupting how we evaluate enterprise software as an industry. With novel AI frameworks like Model Context Protocol (MCP) and Agent-to-Agent (ATA) protocols, we’re starting to see a future where user interfaces can be disaggregated from the underlying data itself. If AI-based tool calling delivers on its promise, theres no reason someone shouldnt be able to change an address, retrieve a paystub, modify a customer order, reset a password, or increase a purchase orderall from the same pane of glass or GenAI prompt bar. The ability to design this unified interface finally enables meaningful IT differentiation among companies. Until now, enterprise customers had no choice but to purchase software for virtually everything because developing and maintaining applications with exceptional UI, robust databases, and enterprise-grade security was prohibitively costly. With AI, the economics have shifted dramaticallythe cost of building something uniquely tailored to our business is plummeting as software learns to write, maintain, and improve itself. In my field, every pharmaceutical company has historically relied on the same suite of enterprise applications, making differentiation nearly impossible. This raises a fundamental question, especially at this moment of accelerating AI innovation: Should we continue purchasing the costly applications everyone else uses, or should we start building solutions that give us an edge? AI First By adopting an AI-first approach, my company has developed an enterprise software catalog that outperformsand costs less thananything available for purchase, solving the age-old challenge of data discovery across our corporate systems. Throughout our organization, even in processes far removed from laboratory work, we’re starting to see how bespoke tools without traditional user interfaces can execute tasks in seconds that previously required 30+ minutes across multiple systems, accelerating how we discover and develop lifesaving medicines. I’m not suggesting companies should build custom ERP systems or replace every piece of software. Rather, AI and agentic frameworks give us the freedom to assess where real value is being createdwhich is typically closer to the end user. We can now selectively build applications that directly improve our competitive advantage while continuing to rely on proven solutions for core operational functions. The Tech Is Changing, and So Is the Talent With this newfound ability to build transformative solutions, the domain of configuring software, while still crucial, remains a necessary but insufficient skill set. The way we think about talent is fundamentally changing. By becoming more comfortable building technologynot just buying or configuring itmy organization has doubled in size while significantly reducing its cost to the company. We’re still hungry for more people with the right skills. Fortunately, were seeing the next generation of undergraduate and graduate programs blend AI, computer and life sciences, and computational drug discovery and development. The twin torrent of advances in AI and biomedicine is creating rewarding career paths for emerging tech talentoffering purpose, future-shaping potential, and the opportunity to make a uniquely human impact. Its a uniquely exciting time to be a technologist in life sciences. In five years, the work we do to benefit patientsthe applications and software we create to speed the discovery and delivery of new medicineswill be almost unrecognizable. While change at this pace brings inevitable turbulence, it also expands the role of tech leaders from enablers to architects of enterprise strategy. The opportunity isnt just to keep upits to help shape what comes next.
Category:
E-Commerce
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