Tech Giant Revenue Mix
The five tech giants have very different revenue mixes as shown in this 100% stacked bar chart. Alphabet and Facebook get almost all of their revenue from ads. Apple relies mostly on hardware and Amazon relies mostly on product sales. Microsoft has the most diverse sources of revenue with a mix of software, hardware and cloud revenue. Overall the 5 tech giants rely on hardware for 36% of their 2016 revenue with Apple's products accounting for most of this. Online retail, mostly from Amazon, contributes 22%. Facebook, Google YouTube and Bing ads make up 20%. Software and cloud and server revenue make up 6% each.
100% Stacked Bar Chart
How I Created The 100% Stacked Bar Chart
There were two options I considered for showing how revenue streams differed among the 5 tech giants. I could have used a Marimekko chart. If I had, the bar widths would correspond to the total revenues of each company. Apple would have been the widest bar and Facebook the narrowest. I chose the 100% stacked bar, which made each bar width and height the same. This focuses the reader on the mix differences.
Adding the "Combined" bar on the left served two purposes. It showed the relative size of each revenue category across the 5 companies. It also served as a legend for the rest of the chart. I colored each segment so that all the hardware, online retail, advertising, software and cloud/server segments were the same color for each company.
There were two other features of note in this chart:
- data rows showed total market capitalization, revenue and earnings for each company and the combined companies
- labels for the two smallest segments (Other Bets for Alphabet and Other for Amazon) were annotated as they were too small to show in their segments.
Take This Chart and Make It Your Own
Download this chart and edit it using Mekko Graphics. To learn more about bar charts, see these examples in our Chart Gallery or look at these 100% stacked bar charts in Chart of the Week. Check out our videos to learn more how to make a bar chart and how to add data rows to your charts.
