Saturday, June 19, 2010

Market Capitalization analysis

I was checking out Yahoo's multimedia/graphics software Industry Center page, and saw my stock picks in the top 5 in Market Capitalization.  (Though it's probably important to note that the majority of video game companies listed here are NOT publicly traded in the US [as I learned from NCsoft].  Most of them are quite small compared to these biggies  though.)  There are 24 publicly traded companies in this industry, and it's interesting to see how they stack up against the top 5.

Market Capitalization is a form of measuring a business size through multiplying the number of shares outstanding by the value per share.  Pretty simple!  (I know there are other ways to measure business size though.)

I was very surprised at how much larger Activision Blizzard was than any of the others, especially electronic arts.  (Nearly 3 times the size!)  To me, EA is a much more prominent brand name.  I think perhaps Activision Blizzard prefers to brand its products with the names of its subsidiaries instead of its overall identity, but I could be off base about that.

I was also interested to see how relatively little TOTAL market share that games really had.

I'll admit I don't fully understand yet is that top chart, and why the Interday Price Performance and why the market caps are so much higher there than in the market capitalization chart.




Putting things into perspective...
Being exposed to game marketing and culture more than the average citizen, I'm starting to think I've overestimated the total market share that this industry has.  So I decided to compare the top industry performers of various sectors with my own.

TOTAL leaders and laggards:

Multimedia & Graphics Software leaders and laggards:

My addition and estimates therefore put the entire M&G sector at 40 Billion at the MOST, keeping in mind that the amount attributed to video games alone is less.  (We'll say about 30 billion).  

I'll admit that, somewhat to my disappointment, this is chump change compared to some other industries.  It's like 3% of oil and gas, about 0.4% of telecom services.  True, I'm not sure I would want to live in a world where as much as spent on games as is on energy, communication, and life support.  

But it really does show how this sector is a tiny island that can be greatly affected by even small shifts in these mammoths.




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