The Top 25 Global Public Cash-Rich Companies

Public companies world-wide continue to hoard a significant portion of their assets in cash and cash equivalents rather then investing them. Large US firms are among the top hoarders of cash. There are a few logical reasons for holding cash such as taxation on profits repatriated to the US from overseas. But the negative effects of hoarding cash outweighs the positive and logical reasoning. For example, companies usually tend to waste shareholders wealth on acquiring other firms at unjustified prices just because they have tons of cash and management is incompetent to deploy it on productive purposes.

Global Finance magazine published a ranking of the world’s top 25 public firms based on cash on their balance sheet. The methodology used to select the firms:

The Global Finance Cash 25 ranks public companies by cash, cash equivalents and short-term securities on their balance sheets. Data is gathered from more than 70,000 public companies worldwide. It is a ranking of nonfinancial corporations—we exclude financial institutions from the list. Subsidiaries and nonpublic companies are excluded, and we use a minimum 25% holding for the path from a subject company to its ultimate owner as the cutoff for inclusion.

The Top 25 Global Public Companies by Cash on their Balance Sheet:

Rank	Company	Country	Industry	Cash^ ($m)	Cash^ ($m) Previous Year	Change (YoY $m)	Total Assets ($m)
1	MICROSOFT	US	Technology	96282	85465	10817	176223
2	GENERAL ELECTRIC	US	Industrial	70483	90025	458	493072
3	CISCO SYSTEMS	US	Technology	60416	52074	8342	113481
4	TOYOTA MOTOR*	Japan	Automotive	43427	41500	1927	397384
5	APPLE	US	Technology	41601	25077	16524	290479
6	JOHNSON & JOHNSON	US	Consumer Products	38376	33089	5287	133411
7	AMGEN	US	Biotech	31382	27026	4356	71449
8	TOTAL	France	Oil and Gas	29459	26474	2985	224484
9	INTEL	US	Technology	25313	14054	11259	101459
10	GENERAL MOTORS	US	Automotive	23401	28176	-4775	194338
11	PFIZER	US	Pharma	23290	36122	-12832	167381
12	SAMSUNG ELECTRONICS	South Korea	Consumer Electronics	23253	18309	4944	206550
13	VODAFONE	UK	Telecoms	20795	15891	4904	192587
14	HON HAI PRECISION INDUSTRY	Taiwan	Consumer Electronics	20143	21572	-1429	70038
15	COCA-COLA	US	Beverages	19900	21675	-1775	89996
16	AMAZON	US	Retail	19808	17416	2392	65444
17	DAIMLER	Germany	Automotive	18574	18123	451	236429
18	TAIWAN SEMICONDUCTOR	Taiwan	Technology	17785	13789	3996	50292
19	QUALCOMM	US	Telecoms	17321	17565	-244	50796
20	SONY*	Japan	Consumer Electronics	15703	18270	-2566	131832
21	MITSUBISHI	Japan	Automotive	15590	15663	-73	132436
22	HYUNDAI MOTOR	South Korea	Automotive	14883	19969	-5085	141039
23	GILEAD SCIENCES	US	Biotech	14607	10128	4479	51716
24	ENEL	Italy	Utilities	14175	20727	-6552	175476
25	GREE ELECTRIC	China	Consumer Products	13682	8928	4755	24,90

* FY 2014, all others FY 2015 ^Includes cash, cash equivalents and short-term securities (those maturing between three months and a year). Data valid as of July 21, 2016.

Source: The World’s Richest Companies 2016: Global Cash 25, Global Finance

A few observations:

US tech firms such as Cisco(CSCO), Interl(INTC), Apple(AAPL), Microsoft (MSFT) etc. hold billions in cash. Unlike other industries tech companies tend to use their cash more for growth by acquisitions than use it for organic growth.
Globally automotive firms also hoard large amounts of cash.
While large cash hoards helps management to deploy it any way they wish, they do not mean much to shareholders. In fact, some investors prefer firms to invest the cash productively or distribute them to shareholders.

Disclosure: No Positions