Last quarter we looked at the financials and underlying product & service portfolios of four of the biggest technology companies in the post “Side by Side: Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon“. With the recent reporting of results for Q1 2012 it is a good time to revisit this subject.

Comparison of Financials Q4 2011 and Q1 2012 for Apple, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon.

Market cap has grown roughly by 25% for both Apple and Amazon, whereas Microsoft and Google only added 5% or less. A sequential quarter comparison can be misleading due to seasonal changes, which impact different industries and business models in a different way. For example, Google’s ad revenue is somewhat less impacted by seasonal shopping than the other companies.

Sequential quarter comparison of financials

Apple and Microsoft seem to be impacted in a similar way by seasonal changes. For Amazon, which already has by far the lowest margin of all four companies, operating income decreased by 40% while it increased its headcount by 17%. This leads to much lower income per employee and with increased stock price to a doubling of its already very high P/E ratio. I’m not a stock market analyst, but Amazon’s P/E ratio of now near 200 seems extraordinarily high. By comparison, the other companies look downright cheap: Apple 8.8, Microsoft 10.5, Google 14.5

Horace Dediu from asymco.com has also revisited this topic in his post “Which is best: hardware, software, or services?“. What’s striking is that all three companies (except Amazon) now have operating margins between 30-40% – very high for such large businesses – with Apple taking the top near 40%. Over the last 5 years, Apple has doubled it’s margin (20% to 40%), whereas Microsoft (35-40%) and Google (30-35%) remained near their levels.

(Source: Asymco.com)

Long term the most important aspect of a business is not how big it has become, but how profitable it is. In that regard Amazon is the odd one out. Their operating income last quarter was about 1% of revenue. Amazon needs to move $100 worth of goods to earn $1. They employ 65,000 people and had revenue of $13.2b last quarter, yet only earned $130m during that time! Apple earns more money just with their iPad covers! Amazon’s strategy is to subsidize the initial Kindle Fire sale and hoping to make money on the additional purchases over the lifetime of the product. In light of these numbers, do you think Amazon has a future with it’s Kindle Fire tablet against the iPad?

But what really struck me about the extreme differences in profitability is this comparison of Apple and Microsoft product lines (source: @asymco twitter):

(source: @asymco twitter)

This shows what an impressive and sustained success the iPhone has been. And the iPad is on track to grow even faster. Horace Dediu guesses that Apple’s iPad will be a bigger profit generator than Windows in one quarter, and a bigger profit generator than Google (yes, all of Google) in three quarters. We will check on those predictions when the time comes…