Internet Companies

What if Internet
Companies were
countries?

Group 7
Bettini Matteo, Cremonesi Teresa,
Enache Alexandru, Lombardi Giovanni,
Pagano Valentina, Ren Pengyuan

In the past few years internet companies have increased, grew and developed incredible economic values and powers. This project approaches the topic by comparing corporations with the concept of country, with the intent of reaching more easily the common sense of notion of institution by the reader. Therefore companies are presented as real nations, translating some characteristics, such as: Gross Domestic Products (GDP) into Market Capitalization, population in employees, flags as model of business category. Another comparison is made with a country from the real world (Denmark), highlighting the real but theorical connection with companies.

A country as an economic power

MARKETCAP AS THE GDPs

The infographic creates a visual hierarchy since the economical power of the internet companies is demonstrated by the size of their area: the most valuable and richest companies are also the biggest. To quantify the power more deeply, the companies are compared to a real country of the world (Denmark). This country was chosen as the basis of comparison because it is a well-known highly developed European nation, with a GDP theoretically acquirable by the companies. The economic size of Denmark is shown inside of the company to visualize how small it is, compared to the biggest one.

Each square accounts for one billion USD of market cap, the dark gray part and the highlighted pink aera represent the Market Capitalization of the company and the GDP of Denmark respectively.

A country as a community of individuals

EMPLOYEES AS POPULATION

As a population of a country generates an amount of wealth, in the same way the concept is presented by employees producing value within the companies. The differentiation of market capitalization value generated by small or big amount of employee is highlighted, showing which companies have the biggest “human presence” or the lowest ones. For example some corporations are primarily machine-based, so they don’t need a massive amount of employees.

As the diagram shows, JD.com has a relatively small company value but each billion of it was generated by a massive amount of employees.

Flags as translation of business category

BUSINESS CATEGORIES AS IDENTITIES

Standard national flags of cartographic maps are interpreted into new ones representing a system of classification. Through the different layouts is possible to understand directly which is the main business of each company and how they appear to their clients/users. Moreover, the colors of the flags were extracted from the identities of the companies they are referring to.

The internet companies have been categorized into three different clusters: retail, advertising, and services. Also, there are two more sub-categories under advertising and three for services. As the four Chinese internet giants that shows in the diagram above.

Timezone as employees zone

HOW INTERNET COMPANIES MAKE MONEY

Referring to the cartographic time zones, different ranges of company amount of employees are displayed along the Y axis. The tendency is that the majority of the internet companies stay under the 60.000 employee range. On the other hand, the e-commerce and advertising giants from US and China are from a very disproportionate range, going from 100.000 up to 650.000 employees (Amazon).

Time zones are adapted for the various amounts of employees like in the real cartographic standard of adapting the lines to the country’s shapes. Also, the different intensities of the color recalls standard of the physical map legendas.

Datasets

Data Source

Yahoo finance, Ycharts

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