Coverage

Apple designs a tightly integrated system of hardware, software and services and monetises it twice — once when it sells a device, and then continuously thereafter through a high-margin services layer that runs on the installed base those devices create.

Adobe is a subscription software company: it sells recurring, ratably-recognized access to the creative, document, and marketing-technology tools that a large share of the world's content is made, published, and measured with — and it earns its returns by…

Amazon.com, Inc. is best understood not as one company but as two very different economic engines carried on a single balance sheet: a vast, thin-margin retail-and-logistics operation that produces the bulk of revenue, and a high-margin cloud-computing and…

American Water Works Company, Inc. is the largest and most geographically diverse publicly traded water and wastewater utility in the United States, measured by both operating revenue and population served.…

Costco Wholesale Corporation (COST) is best understood not as a retailer but as a subscription business wrapped around one. Members pay a recurring annual fee for the right to buy a deliberately narrow range of…

Catalyst Pharmaceuticals was a U.S. rare-disease specialty pharmaceutical company that made money not by discovering drugs but by acquiring or in-licensing the rights to already-approved orphan therapies and then selling them, at high per-patient prices,…

Salesforce sells enterprise software as a subscription: customers pay recurring fees — mostly under one-to-three-year contracts recognized ratably — to use its customer-relationship-management and, increasingly, AI applications delivered from a shared…

CrowdStrike sells cybersecurity as a subscription. A single lightweight software sensor, installed once on a customer's endpoints and cloud workloads, streams security telemetry into the company's cloud platform; the customer then pays a recurring annual…

Dover is a decentralized industrial holding company that owns a portfolio of niche manufacturing businesses — most of them long-standing leaders in small, defensible markets — and compounds shareholder value by running them lean, reinvesting their cash at…

Diamondback Energy is a pure-play Permian Basin oil and gas producer: it drills, completes and operates its own wells across a large, contiguous acreage position in West Texas and southeastern New Mexico, and sells the resulting oil, natural gas and…

General Dynamics designs, builds and services high-end, long-cycle defense and business-aviation hardware — nuclear-powered submarines and surface warships, land-combat vehicles and munitions, defense-technology products and services, and Gulfstream…

Alphabet (GOOG) is, at its economic core, a global advertising toll booth: it operates the world's most-used search engine and largest video platform, aggregates the resulting user attention at planetary scale,…

Johnson & Johnson is a holding company that develops, manufactures and sells patent-protected pharmaceuticals and medical devices in virtually every country in the world; it earns its returns by translating sustained, large-scale research investment into…

Mastercard earns a small, volume-based fee every time money moves across its global payments network: it authorizes, clears and settles electronic transactions between banks, and increasingly sells data-driven services on top of that switching flow —…

Meta Platforms, Inc. is an advertising business wrapped in a social-network: it assembles the largest engaged consumer audience in the world across a family of free apps, then sells advertisers precise access to that audience — and it now channels the…

Microsoft sells mission-critical software and cloud infrastructure to enterprises and consumers on a recurring, subscription- and consumption-based model, monetising one of the largest installed bases in technology through contractually sticky…

NVIDIA sells the compute engine of the artificial-intelligence build-out: it designs the accelerated-computing processors — and, increasingly, the complete rack-scale systems, networking, and software that surround them — on which the world's largest cloud…

PepsiCo makes money by manufacturing branded convenient foods and beverages and moving them, at scale and at a modest premium to private label, through what is arguably the industry's densest direct-store-delivery (DSD) system — with the larger and…

PayPal takes a fee every time money moves across a network on which it sits on both sides of the transaction — a cut of the payment itself, and a second cut of the credit, currency-conversion and interest-bearing services wrapped around it.

QUALCOMM makes money two distinct ways: it sells Snapdragon and Dragonwing system-on-chip semiconductors that go into phones, cars and connected devices (the QCT segment), and it collects a per-unit royalty on essentially every 3G, 4G and 5G cellular…

Southern Copper mines copper — together with by-product molybdenum, silver, zinc and gold — from a set of large, high-grade, long-life open-pit deposits in Peru and Mexico, processes it through its own smelters and refineries, and sells almost all of it…

UnitedHealth Group earns its money in two economically distinct ways that management deliberately runs as one system: it collects fixed premiums to bear the medical-cost risk of roughly the entire spectrum of U.S. health coverage (UnitedHealthcare), and it…

Waste Management makes its money by controlling the disposal end of the North American waste chain: it operates the largest network of landfills in the United States and Canada and preferentially routes its own collected waste into disposal sites and…

Novo Nordisk is one half of a global duopoly in metabolic medicine: it discovers, manufactures and sells peptide-based therapies for diabetes and obesity, and monetises them through the price and volume of a single dominant molecule — semaglutide — sold…

Technip Energies N.V. designs, engineers and builds the large processing plants that turn hydrocarbons and low-carbon feedstocks into liquefied natural gas, ethylene, hydrogen, sustainable fuels and captured…