The Lonergan SV150 - Looking Back Ten Years

A decade of change remakes the Silicon Valley landscape

Susan Lonergan, June 18th, 2019

Ten Big Changes in Ten Sil­i­con Val­ley Years

  1. Total sales of the SV150 grew from $452 bil­lion in 2009 to $1,085 bil­lion today (2.4 x)
  2. Mar­ket cap of the SV150 grew from $1.4 tril­lion in 2009 to $4.9 tril­lion today (3.5 x)
  3. 55 of the com­pa­nies in the SV150 ranked on 2009 sales are still on the list ten years lat­er in 2019; these 55 com­pa­nies rep­re­sent­ed 84% of 2009 sales
  4. Hewlett Packard was in the top 2009 spot with $117 bil­lion in sales; the top spot was over­tak­en by #2 ranked Apple in 2010
  5. Apple was 10% of the sales of the list in 2009, now it is 24% and dwarfs all oth­er SV150 com­pa­nies (it is twice as large as #2 Alphabet)
  6. The largest 2009 com­pa­ny to ​“dis­ap­pear” from the list is #7 ranked Sun Microsys­tems, with $10.7 bil­lion in rev­enues that year; oth­er 2009 tech dar­lings you won’t see any­more today: #11 Yahoo, #62 Palm Com­put­ing, and #88 Sil­i­con Graphics
  7. Two com­pa­nies in today’s top ten were not even on the 2009 list: #5 ranked Face­book (IPO 2012) and #10 ranked Tes­la (IPO 2010)
  8. Size mat­ters: 66% of Top 50 com­pa­nies sur­vived, 34% of Mid 50 sur­vived, and only 10% of the Bot­tom 50 com­pa­nies are still on the list after ten years
  9. The ten years were by no means steadi­ly ​“up and to the right” — about half the 55 sur­viv­ing com­pa­nies climbed spots on the rank­ing, and the oth­er half expe­ri­enced declines in the ranking
  10. Less sil­i­con in Sil­i­con Val­ley: the semi­con­duc­tor sec­tor declined dra­mat­i­cal­ly (43 com­pa­nies down to 23 today), to be replaced by a more than dou­bling of soft­ware com­pa­nies (both sys­tems soft­ware and inter­net appli­ca­tions software)

Thank you to the Mer­cury News for its SV150 list pub­lished April 18, 2010, from which the 2009 data is tak­en; 2009 data expressed in nom­i­nal dol­lars (not adjust­ed for infla­tion). The 2019 Lon­er­gan SV150 rank­ings are pro­vid­ed by Lon­er­gan Part­ners as a pub­lic service.

Click below for a down­load­able PDF of the rank­ings suit­able for printing.

Down­load the Lon­er­gan SV150