article thumbnail

A Blueprint for Digital Companies’ Financial Reporting

Harvard Business Review

On June 25, 2018, Facebook lost market capitalization of more than $100 billion in just two hours of trading after it announced its quarterly performance, despite exceeding analysts’ earnings forecasts. In a market like social media, a firm’s success can depend on the winner-take-all profits that come from market leadership.).

Report 8
article thumbnail

Why We Need to Update Financial Reporting for the Digital Era

Harvard Business Review

The market caps of just four companies, Apple, Alphabet, Amazon, and Microsoft, now exceed $3 trillion. Their combined assets of $944 billion are an order of magnitude lower than the combined assets of $7,700 billion of the largest 3,177 companies in 1986, when the aggregate market capitalization reached $3 trillion for the first time.

Report 8
Insiders

Sign Up for our Newsletter

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

article thumbnail

Midsized Firms Can Survive a Cash Crisis

Harvard Business Review

Operational meltdowns can devour a midsized company’s cash. Large companies rarely face this growth killer since most of them maintain deep cash reserves, have access to the financial markets, and possess the financial discipline to react long before a crash. economy (especially the real estate market) fell off the end of the table.

Crisis 8
article thumbnail

How B2B Software Vendors Can Help Their Customers Benchmark

Harvard Business Review

Those analyses rely on publicly available data sources, but software providers have accumulated growing amounts of private data on almost every aspect of their customers’ technology, operations, people, and strategies. Active investors such as hedge funds seek to outperform the market and index providers.