LONDON: With Google parent Alphabet becoming the latest entrant to Wall Street’s trillion-dollar club, Europe’s blue-chip companies are dwarfed by comparison — the most valuable firm from the “old continent”, Nestle, is worth just a third of that.

Alphabet surged past the $1 trillion mark late on Thursday, joining Apple, Microsoft and Amazon, which had breached that level in 2018 before giving up some of those gains.

Add Facebook and you get a group with a combined market cap of $5.2tr, more than the combined $4.6tr value of the STOXX 50 European index.

Comparing entire benchmark stock indexes, the US S&P 500 has a $27.5tr price tag, almost three times the $10.1tr on the pan-European STOXX 600 .

There is no place for Europe at the global top 10 table where the cheapest company, JPMorgan, scrapes in at $430 billion, well above Nestle’s $315bn.

The main culprit for the huge discrepancy is Europe’s lack of a digital bellwether stock to match the past decade’s tech boom, spearheaded by the US ‘FAANGs’ (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, Google) and China’s ‘BATs’ (Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent).

The FAANGs have transformed the US equity landscape, with the Top 5 US stocks accounting for almost a fifth of the market cap of the whole S&P500. Here’s a trip down memory lane when oil majors and banks reigned supreme on Wall Street.

Published in Dawn, January 19th, 2020