Warren Buffett just held the annual meeting for his massive Berkshire Hathaway. Built over decades, it is now one of the largest companies in America. Berkshire owns several financial services companies and a railroad. It also owns parts of several large public corporations. This list is long and includes Apple, Wells Fargo, and Chevron.<\/p>\n
American companies make investments in private companies as well. Mostly, these are strategic investments. They are meant to bolster the public corporation’s core strategies.<\/p>\n
Broker Chooser recently published a study titled Which U.S. Top Companies Are The Biggest Investors. It picked the companies based on market capitalization, and then looked at the private company investment base maintained by Crunchbase.<\/p>\n
The authors of the study report that the data points to something regarding the upcoming corporate plans “…by looking at the industries that these companies are investing most heavily in, we can learn which sectors are the most important to their future growth, as well as where their financial analysts see the most potential profit.”<\/p>\n
The company that has made the most investments is Cisco. The huge router company has a market cap of $229 billion. That makes it the 34th most valuable public corporation in America. Cisco had revenue of $50 billion last year. Its operating cash flow was over $15 billion. Cisco is an international operation, with more than 40% of its revenue coming from overseas.<\/p>\n
Cisco’s total portfolio includes 214 investments. Cisco is followed by an investment banking firm–Morgan Stanley– with 206 investments, and Microsoft with 163. A large number of the companies with substantial numbers of investments are tech firms. This includes Amazon, Qualcomm, Intel, Meta, Salesforce, and Texas Instruments.<\/p>\n