The market seems to love Facebook’s business of selling your private data to hungry advertisers. So much so, in fact, that the serial privacy invader has left retail giant Wal-Mart behind in the dust, with the company surpassing $236 billion in value. That puts it above retail giant Wal-Mart’s $235 billion.
According to analysts the value gap has been closed by a huge increase in Facebook’s shares over the last year and a drawn out stalling for those of Wal-Mart, thanks to soft sales and low growth.
Over the last year the social media company’s shares have risen approximately 30% while the S&P 500 has just increased marginally, boosting Facebook’s market cap by $65 billion.
While experts caution in drawing conclusions from the valuations, considering there is substantial differences between Facebook’s and Wal-Mart’s revenues,($476 billion for Wal-Mart and $12.5 billion for Facebook) it nonetheless shows that to investors, technology’s importance and value to society is growing.
They point to the fact that the biggest U.S. firms in stock market cap value are presently Apple Inc. and Microsoft Corporation, with Google Inc ranked fifth.
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