Cisco Valuation Multiples

Apple is among the largest companies in the world, with a broad portfolio of hardware and software products targeted at consumers and businesses. Apple’s iPhone makes up a majority of the firm sales, and Apple’s other products like Mac, iPad, and Watch are designed around the iPhone as the focal point of an expansive software ecosystem. Apple has progressively worked to add new applications, like streaming video, subscription bundles, and augmented reality. The firm designs its own software and semiconductors while working with subcontractors like Foxconn and TSMC to build its products and chips. Slightly less than half of Apple’s sales come directly through its flagship stores, with a majority of sales coming indirectly through partnerships and distribution.

Microsoft is an American technology company headquartered in Redmond, Washington that sells software, cloud computing services, devices and games to consumers, businesses and governments. It was founded on 4 April 1975 by Bill Gates and Paul Allen and has been led by chief executive Satya Nadella since February 2014. Its products include the Windows operating system, the Microsoft 365 productivity suite, the Azure cloud platform, the Copilot AI assistant, Xbox consoles and games, the LinkedIn professional network, the GitHub developer platform and the Bing search engine. In the fiscal year to 30 June 2026 revenue rose 18% to $331.8 billion, operating income reached $155.2 billion and net income $133.7 billion; Azure revenue passed $100 billion for the first time and Microsoft 365 Copilot exceeded 30 million paid seats. The company earns money from cloud subscriptions and consumption, software licences, advertising, and hardware and game sales, and employs about 223,000 people. Major acquisitions include LinkedIn for $26.2 billion in 2016 and Activision Blizzard for $68.7 billion in 2023, and it is a major investor in OpenAI under a multi-year, multi-billion-dollar partnership announced in January 2023.

Alphabet is a technology holding company headquartered in Mountain View, California. It was created on October 2, 2015 through a restructuring of Google, which became its largest subsidiary, and it is controlled by founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. The group earns most of its income from advertising on Google Search, YouTube and its ad network, and it also sells cloud computing services, subscriptions and consumer hardware. Other business units, grouped as Other Bets, include the autonomous driving company Waymo, the life sciences company Verily and the research lab Google DeepMind. Alphabet also holds equity stakes in artificial intelligence, space and energy companies and invests through its own venture arms GV and CapitalG. It has grown through acquisitions of software, hardware and cloud security businesses. Its shares are listed on the Nasdaq under the tickers GOOGL and GOOG.

Amazon is an American technology and retail company headquartered in Seattle, Washington, with a second headquarters in Arlington County, Virginia. It runs the amazon.com online store and marketplace for third-party sellers, the Amazon Prime subscription programme, which had 200 million subscribers worldwide in 2021, and Amazon Web Services, the cloud computing unit launched in 2002 that rents data storage and computing power to companies. It also sells Echo, Kindle and Fire devices, distributes video, music and audiobooks through Prime Video, MGM+, Amazon Music, Twitch and Audible, and owns the Whole Foods Market grocery chain, Ring, IMDb and the self-driving car developer Zoox. Amazon earns revenue from product sales, seller commissions and fulfilment fees, subscriptions, cloud services and advertising. It reported revenue of US$716.9 billion and net income of US$77.7 billion in 2025 with about 1,576,000 employees, making it the world's largest company by revenue as of 2026 and the second-largest private employer in the United States. Jeff Bezos founded the company as Cadabra on July 5, 1994, in Bellevue, Washington, as an online bookstore and renamed it Amazon that November. Bezos, who owns about 8.8% of the shares, became executive chairman in July 2021, when former AWS chief Andy Jassy became chief executive.

Samsung Electronics is a South Korean public technology manufacturer incorporated in 1969 and headquartered in Suwon. Its Device eXperience division sells smartphones, televisions, home appliances, computers and network products to consumers and enterprise customers. The Device Solutions division manufactures memory, logic and other semiconductor products, while Samsung Display produces display panels and Harman supplies automotive electronics and connected-audio systems. The company earns revenue from product sales, components, licensing and related services across a worldwide manufacturing and distribution network. Samsung Electronics listed in Korea in 1975 and operates through hundreds of subsidiaries and regional organisations. It also makes strategic and venture investments that support technologies relevant to semiconductors, devices, artificial intelligence, robotics and its broader product ecosystem.

Palantir is an artificial intelligence, analytics, and automated decision-making company that leverages data to drive efficiency across its clients' organizations. The firm serves commercial and government clients via its Foundry and Gotham platforms, respectively. Palantir works only with entities in Western-allied nations and reserves the right not to work with anyone that is antithetical to Western values. The company was founded in 2003 and went public in 2020.

Oracle is an American multinational technology company headquartered in Austin, Texas, having moved its head office from Redwood Shores, California, in December 2020. It was co-founded on June 16, 1977, in Santa Clara, California, by Larry Ellison, Bob Miner and Ed Oates as Software Development Laboratories, and took its name from its flagship Oracle Database. Oracle sells database software, enterprise applications including enterprise resource planning, human capital management, customer experience and supply chain software, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and hardware to businesses and governments. It acquired Sun Microsystems and, in June 2022, Cerner for $28.3 billion, which now forms Oracle Health. In January 2025 Oracle joined OpenAI, SoftBank and MGX in the Stargate AI infrastructure venture, and in September 2025 it signed a $300 billion contract with OpenAI for 4.5 gigawatts of capacity over five years. For the quarter ended November 2025 it reported revenue of $14.1 billion, with cloud infrastructure revenue up 68% to $4.1 billion and remaining performance obligations of $130 billion. It employed 141,000 full-time staff in May 2026, and Clay Magouyrk and Mike Sicilia succeeded Safra Catz as co-CEOs, with Ellison as chairman and chief technology officer.

Founded in Germany in 1972 by former IBM employees, SAP is the world’s largest provider of enterprise application software. Known as the leader in enterprise resource planning software, SAP’s portfolio also includes software for supply chain management, procurement, travel and expense management, and customer relationship management, among others. The company operates in more than 180 countries and has more than 400,000 customers, approximately 80% of which are small to medium-size enterprises.

Alibaba Group is a Chinese technology company headquartered in Hangzhou, Zhejiang, founded on 28 June 1999 by Jack Ma and 17 friends and students as the business-to-business marketplace Alibaba.com. It operates China's largest consumer marketplaces, Taobao (consumer-to-consumer) and Tmall (business-to-consumer), the global B2B site Alibaba.com and domestic wholesale platform 1688, alongside international e-commerce, Alibaba Cloud, the Cainiao logistics network, local consumer services and digital media and entertainment businesses, reorganised in 2023 into six business groups. It earns revenue mainly from merchant advertising and commissions on its marketplaces, plus cloud computing, logistics and direct sales. Early backers included Goldman Sachs, SoftBank and Investor AB, which invested $25 million in October 1999. Its September 2014 New York Stock Exchange IPO raised $25 billion, then the largest in history, giving it a market value of $231 billion, and in January 2018 it became the second Asian company to pass a $500 billion valuation. Joseph Tsai became chairman and Eddie Wu chief executive in 2023.

Palo Alto Networks is a platform-based cybersecurity vendor with product offerings covering network security, cloud security, and security operations. The California-based firm has more than 80,000 enterprise customers across the world, including more than three fourths of the Global 2000.

IBM (International Business Machines) is an American technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York, and operating in more than 175 countries. It sells hybrid-cloud and AI software, including Red Hat and the watsonx portfolio, IT consulting services, and infrastructure hardware such as IBM Z mainframes. Its customers are mainly large enterprises and governments, and it earns revenue from software subscriptions and licences, consulting and managed-services contracts, and hardware sales and financing. In 2025 IBM reported revenue of $67.5 billion, up 8%, with software up 11%, consulting up 2% and infrastructure up 12%, and free cash flow of $14.7 billion. The company was founded in 1911 as the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company and renamed International Business Machines in 1924; it dominated mainframe computing with the System/360 and launched the IBM Personal Computer in 1981 before selling its PC division to Lenovo in 2005. More recently it bought Red Hat for $34 billion in 2019, spun off its managed infrastructure services unit as Kyndryl in 2021, and in December 2025 agreed to acquire data-streaming company Confluent for about $11 billion. Arvind Krishna is chairman and chief executive.

CrowdStrike is a cloud-native cybersecurity company specializing in security verticals such as endpoint, cloud workload, identity, and security operations. CrowdStrike's primary offering is its Falcon platform, which provides enterprises with a unified view to detect and respond to security threats across their IT infrastructure. The Austin, Texas-based firm was founded in 2011 and went public in 2019.

Arista Networks is a networking equipment provider that primarily sells Ethernet switches and software to data centers. Its marquee product is its extensible operating system that runs a single image across every single one of its devices. The firm operates as one reportable segment. It has steadily gained market share since its founding in 2004, with a focus on high-speed applications. Arista counts Microsoft and Meta Platforms as its largest customers and derives roughly three-fourths of its sales from North America.

Dell Technologies is a broad information technology vendor, primarily supplying hardware to enterprises. It focuses on premium and commercial personal computers, as well as enterprise on-premises data center hardware. It holds top-three shares in its core markets of personal computers, peripheral displays, mainstream servers, and external storage. Dell has a robust ecosystem of component and assembly partners and also relies heavily on channel partners to fulfill its sales.

Shopify is a Canadian commerce software company headquartered in Ottawa, Ontario, that provides the cloud platform more than 5 million merchants use to run online stores and physical retail. Its subscription plans let businesses build storefronts, manage products, orders and inventory, and sell through point-of-sale systems, social networks and marketplaces, while merchant solutions add Shopify Payments, the Shop Pay accelerated checkout (more than 150 million users in 2024), shipping, merchant lending through Shopify Capital and an app store with more than 10,000 third-party apps. Revenue comes from monthly subscription fees and, increasingly, from payment processing and other transaction-linked services. Merchants processed US$292.3 billion of transactions on the platform in 2024, and 2025 revenue rose 30% to US$11.6 billion with net income of US$1.23 billion; the company had about 7,600 employees in 2025. Shopify was started by Tobias Lütke, Daniel Weinand and Scott Lake, and Lütke remains chief executive. It went public on May 21, 2015, trades on the Toronto Stock Exchange, moved its US listing from the NYSE to Nasdaq on March 31, 2025, and joined the Nasdaq-100 that May.

KLA is one of the largest semiconductor wafer fabrication equipment, or WFE, manufacturers in the world. It specializes in the market segment of semiconductor process control, wherein machines inspect semiconductor wafers during research and development and manufacturing for defects and verify precise measurements. In this section of the market, KLA holds a majority share. It also has a small exposure to the etch and deposition segments of the WFE market. It counts as top customers the largest chipmakers in the world, including TSMC and Samsung.

Salesforce provides enterprise cloud computing solutions. The company offers customer relationship management technology that brings companies and customers together. Its Customer 360 platform helps the group deliver a single source of truth, connecting customer data across systems, apps, and devices to help companies sell, service, market, and conduct commerce. It also offers Service Cloud for customer support, Marketing Cloud for digital marketing campaigns, Commerce Cloud as an e-commerce engine, the Salesforce Platform, which allows enterprises to build applications, and other solutions, such as MuleSoft for data integration.

S&P Global provides data and benchmarks to capital and commodity market participants. Its ratings business is the largest credit rating agency in the world and S&P's largest segment by profitability. S&P's largest segment by revenue is market intelligence, which provides desktop, data and advisory solutions, enterprise solutions, and credit/risk solutions mostly in the financial-services industry. S&P's other segments include energy (formerly commodity insights, this segment includes Platts and other data), mobility (Carfax), and indexes. S&P plans to spin off mobility in 2026.

AppLovin is a vertically integrated advertising technology company that serves as a demand-side platform for advertisers, a supply-side platform for publishers, and an exchange that facilitates transactions between the two. About 80% of AppLovin’s revenue comes from the DSP, AppDiscovery, while the remainder comes from the SSP, Max. AppLovin’s primary tool for future growth is Axon 2, an ad optimizer within the DSP that lets advertisers place ads based on specified return thresholds.

Hitachi Ltd is engaged in diverse businesses spanning industries, energy, IT, and real estate. The company operates through four business segments. The Connective Industries segment covers elevators, escalators, home appliances, air conditioning, semiconductor manufacturing equipment, medical analyzers, industrial and distribution solutions, water and environmental solutions, and industrial equipment. The Digital Systems & Services segment offers system integration, consulting, cloud services, IT products, software, and ATMs. The Green Energy & Mobility segment focuses on power grids, renewable energy, nuclear power, and railway systems. The Others include real estate management, sales, and leasing. It generates the majority of its revenue from the Green Energy & Mobility segment.

Founded in 1954 and headquartered in Tokyo, Advantest specializes in semiconductor test systems and is a well-known leader in automated test equipment, or ATE. Advantest also has a high market share in test systems for nonmemory semiconductors, including application processors for mobile phones. The company is also involved in peripheral businesses, such as semiconductor device transport equipment. Following its acquisition of Verigy in July 2011, Advantest holds a market share of over 60% in the ATE market.

Foxconn Industrial Internet Co Ltd is engaged in the design, research and development, manufacturing, and sales of various electronic equipment products. The company's main products include communications network equipment, cloud service equipment, precision tools, and industrial robots.

Tokyo Electron is the fourth-largest wafer fabrication equipment provider globally by revenue, with a market share of 10% as of 2025. Founded in 1963, the company primarily manufactures etching, deposition, coaters and developers, as well as wafer cleaning equipment used in front-end semiconductor manufacturing. Tokyo Electron’s key customers include global semiconductor leaders in foundry and memory, such as TSMC, Intel, Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix. The company mainly manufactures its products across its factories in Yamanashi, Kumamoto, and Miyagi, Japan.

Mitsubishi Corp. is Japan’s largest general trading house, or sogo shosha, a type of conglomerate unique to Japan. Its core role is that of a trading intermediary in a variety of industrial sectors, including resources businesses like energy and metals as well as non-resources businesses, both industrial ones like automotive and non-industrial ones like food, healthcare, and retail. In addition to acting as a trading intermediary (including midstream processing functions to convert inputs into final products), Mitsubishi also participates in upstream production businesses and downstream distribution businesses.

ServiceNow Inc provides software solutions to structure and automate various business processes via a SaaS delivery model. The company primarily focuses on the IT function for enterprise customers. ServiceNow began with IT service management, expanded within the IT function, and more recently directed its workflow automation logic to functional areas beyond IT, notably customer service, HR service delivery, and security operations. ServiceNow also offers an application development platform as a service.

Founded in 2012, Snowflake is a fully managed platform that consolidates data hosted on different public clouds for centralized analytics and governance. Snowflake’s cloud-native architecture allows users to independently scale the compute and storage layers, providing customers with optimized performance at lower costs. The company’s data lake and data warehouse products support a variety of use cases, including business analytics, data engineering, and artificial intelligence. Snowflake is widely used by Fortune 2000 companies in financial services, media, and retail sectors.

Cloudflare is a software company based in San Francisco, California, that offers security and web performance offerings by utilizing a distributed, serverless content delivery network, or CDN. The firm’s edge computing platform, Workers, leverages this network by providing clients the ability to deploy and execute code without maintaining servers.

Hon Hai Precision is the world's largest contract manufacturer of consumer electronics, communications, and computer products. It is the biggest supplier to Apple, whose business accounted for around 50% of overall revenue in 2025. Hon Hai is also involved in the production of upstream components such as electronic connectors, semiconductor packaging, and metal casings for smartphones, as well as producing servers. These upstream activities are mainly conducted through its listed majority-owned subsidiaries Foxconn Industrial Internet and FIH Mobile. In response to its traditional end markets of computers, smartphones, and telecom equipment maturing in 2019 it started on a strategy to develop expertise in three new growth areas—electric vehicles, digital health, and robotics.

Tata Consultancy Services is a leading global IT services provider based in Mumbai, India. Founded in 1968, it is one of the first companies to leverage a global delivery model that helps clients outsource their IT needs to offshore labor. The company boasts a wide range of offerings, including IT consulting, managed services, and business process outsourcing.

Adobe provides content creation, document management, and digital marketing and advertising software and services to creative professionals and marketers for creating, managing, delivering, measuring, optimizing, and engaging with compelling content multiple operating systems, devices, and media. The company operates with three segments: digital media content creation, digital experience for marketing solutions, and publishing for legacy products (less than 5% of revenue).

Intuit serves small and midsize businesses with accounting software QuickBooks and online marketing platform Mailchimp. The company also operates retail tax filing tool TurboTax, personal finance platform Credit Karma, and a suite of professional tax offerings for accountants. Founded in the mid-1980s, Intuit enjoys a dominant market share for small-to-midsize business accounting and self-serve tax filing in the US.

Cadence Design Systems is a provider of electronic design automation software, intellectual property, and system design and analysis products. EDA software automates and aids in the chip design process, enhancing design accuracy, productivity, and complexity in a full-flow end-to-end solution. Cadence offers a portfolio of design IP, as well as system design and analysis products, which enables system-level analysis and verification solutions.

Fortinet is a platform-based cybersecurity vendor with product offerings covering network security, cloud security, zero-trust access, and security operations. The firm derives a majority of its revenue through sales of its subscriptions and support-based business. The California-based firm has more than 800,000 customers across the world.

Moody’s, along with S&P Ratings, is a leading provider of credit ratings on fixed-income securities. The ratings segment, Moody’s Investors Service, includes corporates, structured finance, financial institutions, and public finance ratings. MIS represents a majority of the firm’s profit and often (depending on bond issuance levels) a majority of the firm's revenue. The other segment, Moody’s Analytics, consists of decision solutions, research and insights, and data and information.

Synopsys is a technology company supplying engineering software and semiconductor intellectual property to companies designing chips and electronic systems. Its electronic design automation tools support the design, verification and implementation of integrated circuits. The company also provides reusable semiconductor IP, including interface, analog, embedded memory and other functional building blocks that customers incorporate into their own chips. Its customers are commercial engineering and product-development organisations across semiconductor and other technology markets. Revenue comes from licensing software and intellectual property and providing associated support, training and engineering services. Its portfolio also includes simulation and analysis technologies used to assess engineering designs and system behaviour. The business combines internally developed technologies with acquired capabilities, including the embedded memory and logic library portfolio obtained through its acquisition of Virage Logic in 2010.

Motorola is a United States public-safety and enterprise-security technology company supplying land-mobile radio systems, command-center software, video security, analytics, and managed services to governments and businesses. The organization serves customers through a defined operating business rather than acting as an investment vehicle. Its team combines sector expertise, customer delivery, technology or physical operations, and continuing product development. Clients use its products or services to solve recurring operational needs in the markets where it is active. Revenue is generated from commercial products, recurring software, or contracted services supplied to customers. The company maintains its own management, workforce, commercial identity, and relationships with customers and suppliers. Its transaction history is tracked under this operating identity so that similarly named businesses in other countries or industries are not combined with it. The cited company and transaction sources establish the identity, location, activity, and role used in this research packet.

RELX is a global provider of information-based analytics and decision tools for professional and business customers in various industries. The company serves sectors such as science and medical research, risk management, and legal. In addition, RELX organizes large-scale digital and face-to-face events such as industry trade shows. Around 60% of revenue is generated in North America and about 20% in Europe.

Vertiv has roots tracing back to 1946 when its founder, Ralph Liebert, developed an air-cooling system for mainframe data rooms. As computers started making their way into commercial applications in 1965, Liebert developed one of the first computer room air conditioning, or CRAC, units, enabling the precise control of temperature and humidity. The firm has slowly expanded its data center portfolio through internal product development and the acquisition of thermal and power management products like condensers, busways, and switches. Vertiv has global operations today; its products can be found in data centers in most regions throughout the world.

Datadog is a cloud-native company that focuses on analyzing machine data. The firm's product portfolio, delivered via software as a service, enables clients to monitor and analyze their entire information technology infrastructure, from servers to applications and Python scripts. Datadog's platform can ingest and analyze large amounts of machine-generated data in real time, allowing clients to utilize it for a variety of applications throughout their businesses to ensure uptime and latency objectives.

NAURA Technology Group Co Ltd engages in the research, development, manufacture, sale, and service of electronic equipment and components in the People's Republic of China. The company offers semiconductor equipment, including etching equipment, PVD and CVD equipment, oxidation/diffusion equipment, cleaning equipment, novel display equipment, gas mass flow controllers, etc., and vacuum heat treatment equipment and technical solutions for the semiconductors, photovoltaic equipment, vacuum electronic devices, magnetic materials, aerospace, and smart power grid sectors.

TE Connectivity is the largest electrical connector supplier in the world, supplying interconnect and sensor solutions to the transportation, industrial, and communications markets. With operations in 150 countries and over 500,000 stock-keeping units, TE has a broad portfolio that forms the electrical architecture of its end customers' cutting-edge innovations.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise is an enterprise IT company headquartered in Spring, Texas, near Houston. It sells servers, networking equipment, hybrid-cloud and storage products and financing to business customers, and offers its HPE GreenLake platform as pay-per-use cloud consumption. In fiscal 2025 (year ended October 31, 2025) net revenue was $34.3 billion, up 14%, split across Server ($17.7 billion), Networking ($6.9 billion), Hybrid Cloud ($5.8 billion) and Financial Services ($3.5 billion), and it had approximately 67,000 employees. Revenue comes from hardware, software and services sales, GreenLake consumption services and financing through its Financial Services arm. On July 2, 2025 it completed the acquisition of Juniper Networks for total consideration of $13.6 billion, and Networking revenue rose 51% in fiscal 2025. HPE was created on November 1, 2015, when Hewlett-Packard split into HP Inc. and Hewlett Packard Enterprise; in 2017 it spun off its Enterprise Services business into DXC Technology and its software business into Micro Focus, and Antonio Neri has been CEO since 2018.

Mitsubishi Electric is a Tokyo diversified industrial manufacturer founded in 1921 and publicly listed in Japan. It designs and sells factory-automation equipment, power and energy systems, building systems, transportation products, automotive equipment, semiconductors, communications equipment and consumer appliances. Industrial companies, utilities, infrastructure operators, governments, commercial-building owners and households use its products. Revenue comes primarily from equipment and component sales, supported by installation, maintenance, engineering and other services. The group operates manufacturing, research, sales and service networks across Asia, Europe, the Americas and other regions. Its space and defence business supplies satellite, communications and related aerospace systems. Mitsubishi Electric also invests strategically where partnerships can expand technology and commercial access. It co-invested with COFIDES in PLD Space's 2026 Series C financing and was identified as a lead investor in that round.

Murata Manufacturing produces passive components for electronic devices. Passive components are necessary for all electronic circuits, used to enable wireless communication, store electricity and handle electric flow, remove electromagnetic noise from circuits, and so on. Thus, passive components are imperative for electronic circuits. For instance, one high-end smartphone contains more than 1,000 passive components. Murata Manufacturing is the world's leading supplier of passive components, such as MLCC and SAW filters.

Founded in 1982, Autodesk is a multinational software company best known for pioneering computer-aided design, or CAD, with its AutoCAD product. Nowadays, Autodesk provides design software for a variety of verticals, including architecture & construction, manufacturing, and media & entertainment. Autodesk products have been used in some of the world's most iconic landmarks, like Burj Khalifa, and well-known movie titles like Avatar.

Strategy Inc is a bitcoin treasury company and a provider of business intelligence services. It is designed to provide investors varying degrees of economic exposure to Bitcoin by offering a range of securities, including equity and fixed-income instruments. The company also provides industry AI-powered enterprise analytics software. It has one reportable operating segment: the Software Business, which is engaged in the design, development, marketing, and sales of the company's enterprise analytics software platform through cloud subscriptions and licensing arrangements and related services (i.e., product support, consulting, and education). Geographically, the company operates in EMEA, U.S. and Other Regions, of which maximum revenue is derived from U.S..

Constellation Software is an acquirer, manager, and developer of vertical market software, or VMS, businesses globally. VMS differentiates from horizontal software in that it provides mission critical solutions within a specific industry for customers in a particular market. Constellation operates through a decentralized model in which each business operates as its own independent entity. Managers of individual businesses are incentivized to optimize their business for returns on invested capital and revenue growth. Excess cash generated by the individual businesses is repatriated to portfolio managers who focus on allocating as much capital as possible on new acquisitions. As of 2025, Constellation consisted of over 1,000 individual businesses and 64,000 employees.

Idexx Laboratories primarily develops, manufactures, and distributes diagnostic products, equipment, and services for pets and livestock. Its key product lines include single-use canine and feline test kits that veterinarians can employ in the office, benchtop chemistry and hematology analyzers for test-panel analysis on-site, reference lab services, and tests to detect and manage disease in livestock. The firm also offers vet practice management software and consulting services to animal hospitals. Idexx derives roughly 35% of its revenue from outside the United States.