World Top 20 Companies by Market Capitalization in 1989 and 2019

Times are changing. I made two figures that indicate that you would fall behind the times if you didn’t deal with the changes in society appropriately.

The two figures below shows the world top 20 public companies by market capitalization in 1989 and 2019. The time difference is 30 years between the two figures and you can see that the list of companies dramatically changed within the 30 years.

In 1989, Japan was still in the bubble economy and at that time many people believed that the stock market and land prices would keep increasing forever. The Japanese government and many Japanese banks did not have any doubts in their beliefs. But, after the bubble burst, the Japanese economy experienced the so called Lost Decade and many companies in Japan lost their competitiveness in business.

In 2019, 4 of the top 5 companies in the figure for 2019 are in the information technology industry. Due to the expansion of information technology in the world, the companies grew faster than most of other companies in the world. There are some Chinese companies in the top 20, but the most companies are based in the United States. There are no Japanese companies remaining in the top 20 public companies by market capitalization.

For your reference, the data for 1989 is originally extracted from the Business Week magazine 1989/7/17 and the data for 2019 is from Diamond Online journal.





