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Comment by Keyframe | Hacker News Reader

The world’s largest company by market capitalization got a little bit bigger Tuesday.

Shouldn't that be "..largest PUBLIC company by market cap..."? Isn't Saudi Aramco's value in trillions for example?

Market cap implies public company because by definition private companies are not traded publicly on a market. It's the same way start ups have "valuations" and not "market caps".

> private companies are not traded publicly on a market.

Incorrect. They aren't traded on an exchange, but they are certainly traded in a market. A market is any situation where people buy and sell to one another. Venture capitalists certainly buy shares in private companies. Similarly, a private car dealership, private family restaurant, etc can (and often are) sold from the original owner to a new owner. Thus, a market exists.

I think the term you are looking for is exchange. The distinction between a market and an exchange is an exchange creates more explicit rules on trading in order to make the goods traded commoditized.

For example, instead of buying corn at my farmers market where the differences in corn might matter for both price and quality (local, organic, some farmer just happens to grow more delicious corn), when you buy agricultural commodities from Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT), each contract is equivalent. X many bushes of corn at Y price. By making rules on quality and standardizing the goods/contracts/etc, an exchange helps to bring about price discovery and ensure the goods are priced correctly.

But it isn't inherent that exchanges cause the true price to be found or that OTC[0] markets are inferior or less accurate. It depends on numerous factors for whether a share price is being valued correctly.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Over-the-counter_(finance)

Funny that you mention corn specifically, because all contracts are not delivered the same even on-exchange! The deliverable grade of corn is "#2 Yellow at contract Price, #1 Yellow at a 1.5 cent/bushel premium #3 Yellow at a 1.5 cent/bushel discount" per http://www.cmegroup.com/trading/agricultural/grain-and-oilse... .

Along these lines, I heard there were complaints in the UK's LIFFE market because excess rainfall was damaging French wheat crops, but even the poor crops were within the exchange's loose contract specifications.

But I suppose this is a bit of a tangent. The takeaway is that everything is traded on a market somewhere, but there are different sizes and standards for markets. Private companies can have some number of institutional investors while still keeping reporting requirements low (IIRC Facebook ran into this limit before their IPO). Ergo, every company has a market cap, but companies with fewer investors/owners are harder to measure.

IIRC their revenue is about 4x Apple's.

actually, they averaged 95b/qtr last year vs apple's 75b last quarter. They have $36 trillion in assets (consisting of all of SAs oil and gas reserves + the state refining company that was merged in the 90s).

Considering the drop in oil prices lately, it's quite possible Apple's revenue exceeded Aramco's last quarter

Wikipedia tells me the company is valued somewhere between 1 and 7 trillion but has $30+ trillion is assets. I'm not a business person, shouldn't it be valued at more simply by the fact that is has a huge amount of assets?

I'm not an oil or gas expert, but the low valuation vs assets might be because many of those assets are underground in hard to reach places. Reserves may be proven but not economically viable to access at the current price of oil, for example.

Seems about right... Exxon has about 1/12th the proven reserves and (taking the 7t est for aramco) 1/20th the market cap (380b)

http://news.exxonmobil.com/press-release/exxon-mobil-corpora...

A company's valuation is roughly the estimated sum of all its future profits until it shutters or goes bankrupt.

Most of those 30 trillion assets are deep into the ground, and cannot be turned into profits for free. If you need to spend (say) 2 dollars for every 3 dollars of worth of oil you extract, then the value of the company is already <$10T. The operating expenses can be pretty high. There's also taxes and interest.

Also, we don't know what the price of oil will be in 5 or 10 years, so we have to price in that uncertainty too.

How do you measure the market cap of a non publicly traded company? It makes no sense.

last price per share paid (by an investor) times number of shares outstanding?

I don't see why valuation isn't just as good at market cap, if a bit less liquid. same idea.

It absolutely makes sense. All corporations have a market cap because they have shares outstanding and there is a price per share. We can disagree as to whether the share price is what it should be given the lack of trading liquidity, lack of transparency in their books, etc. Nevertheless, there is certainly a share price and a number of outstanding shares.

We can all argue whether Airbnb is worth $2B or $6B and Uber $40+ Billion, but these valuations aren't made up. They follow accounting rules.

One primary example is mark to market. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark-to-market_accounting

The key phrase there was"non publicly traded company". By definition, non publicly traded companies don't have (stock) market capitalization, which is the value of all outstanding shares (stock).

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