By Julien Ponthus and Thyagaraju Adinarayan
LONDON (Reuters) - With Google parent Alphabet (O:GOOGL) becoming the latest entrant to Wall Street's trillion-dollar club, Europe's blue-chip companies are dwarfed by comparison -- the most valuable firm from the "old continent", Nestle, is worth just a third of that.
Alphabet surged past the $1 trillion mark late on Thursday, joining Apple (O:AAPL), Microsoft (O:MSFT) and Amazon (O:AMZN), which had breached that level in 2018 before giving up some of those gains.
Add Facebook (O:FB) (current worth: $630 billion) and you get a group with a combined market cap of $5.2 trillion, more than the combined $4.6 trillion value of the STOXX 50 European index (STOXX50).
(Graphic: Top five U.S. companies bigger than European blue-chip index click, https://fingfx.thomsonreuters.com/gfx/mkt/13/1209/1200/Pasted%20Image.jpg)
Comparing entire benchmark stoc indexes, the U.S. S&P 500 (SPX) has a $27.5 trillion price tag, almost three times the $10.1 trillion on the pan-European STOXX 600 (STOXX).
There is no place for Europe at the global top 10 table where the cheapest company, JPMorgan (NYSE:JPM), scrapes in at $430 billion, well above Nestle's $315 billion.
(Graphic: The World's top ten companies click, https://fingfx.thomsonreuters.com/gfx/mkt/13/1214/1205/Pasted%20Image.jpg)
The main culprit for the huge discrepancy is Europe's lack of a digital bellwether stock to match the past decade's tech boom, spearheaded by the U.S. 'FAANGs' (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix (NASDAQ:NFLX), Google) and China's 'BATs' (Baidu (NASDAQ:BIDU), Alibaba (NYSE:BABA) and Tencent).
The FAANGs have transformed the U.S. equity landscape, with the Top 5 U.S. stocks accounting for almost a fifth of the market cap of the whole S&P500. Here's a trip down memory lane when oil majors and banks reigned supreme on Wall Street.
(Graphic: S&P 500 in 2007s: A good mix click, https://fingfx.thomsonreuters.com/gfx/mkt/13/1212/1203/Pasted%20Image.jpg