The Value & Importance of Silicon Valley.

Yesterday (Wed 23rd April 2014), Facebook and Apple both posted impressive earnings for the first quarter (Jan-March), showing investors that technology is a good business.

The UK has a much smaller technology business, but is home to some very creative companies, such as Skygazer Labs the home of the superb mySymptoms app,  Shazam the music discovery app, BT plc the most dynamic telecoms company in the world, to name just three UK technology players.

Silicon Valley in California is home to the global technology industry. Created in the 1950’s with the start up of Shockley Electronics, that then lead to new companies, such as Robert Noyce, Gordon Moore and Andy Grove leaving Shockley Electronics to form “Integrated Electronics” that is known today as Intel Corporation. This innovation and creativity has lead to many companies in Silicon Valley, such as:-

Intel, Oracle, AMD, Facebook, Google, Symantec, eBay, Hewlett Packard, Yahoo, Apple, Cisco, Juniper, Adobe and Sandisk is name but a handful.

An interesting statistic is to look at the latest annual revenue of these firms:-

Intel US$52.70 billion
Oracle US$37.18 billion
AMD US$5.30 billion
Salesforce $3.05 billion
Facebook US$7.872 billion
Google US$ 59.82 billion
Symantec US$ 6.73 billion
eBay US$ 16.05 billion
Hewlett Packard US$ 112.298 billion
Yahoo US$4.68 billion
Apple US$ 170.910 billion
Cisco US$ 48.607 billion
Juniper US$ 4.66 billion
Adobe US$ 4.40 billion
Sandisk US$ 6.2 billion
Netflix US$4.37 billion

Just these 16 famous name companies, their total annual revenue is US$544.827 Billion

Now that US$544 Billion is only for the just 16 companies that I named above in the past 12 months. US GDP is US$16,000 Billion, (US$16 Trillion) So the 16 famous Silicon Valley companies annual revenue equate to 3.41% of the US annual GDP. Of course their are hundreds of technology companies in Silicon Valley, and I did not mention Microsoft, who are based in Seattle. So one can see the size of the US Technology sector. It is vast.

Silicon Valley is a massive contributor to the US and global economy.

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