0 Technology Sector

Microsoft develops and licenses consumer and enterprise software. It is known for its Windows operating systems and Office productivity suite. The company is organized into three overarching segments: productivity and business processes (legacy Microsoft Office, cloud-based Office 365, Exchange, SharePoint, Skype, LinkedIn, Dynamics), intelligence cloud (infrastructure- and platform-as-a-service offerings Azure, Windows Server OS, SQL Server), and more personal computing (Windows Client, Xbox, Bing search, display advertising, and Surface laptops, tablets, and desktops). Through acquisitions, Microsoft owns Xamarin, LinkedIn, and GitHub. It reports revenue in product and service and other revenue on its income statement.

Apple designs a wide variety of consumer electronic devices, including smartphones (iPhone), tablets (iPad), PCs (Mac), smartwatches (Apple Watch), and TV boxes (Apple TV), among others. The iPhone makes up the majority of Apple's total revenue. In addition, Apple offers its customers a variety of services such as Apple Music, iCloud, Apple Care and Apple Pay, among others. Apple's products run internally developed software and semiconductors, and the firm is well known for its integration of hardware, software and services. Apple's products are distributed online as well as through company-owned stores and third-party retailers. The company generates about 40% of its revenue from the Americas, with the remainder earned internationally.

Intel is one of the world's largest chipmakers. It designs and manufactures microprocessors for the global personal computer and data center markets. Intel pioneered the x86 architecture for microprocessors. It is also the prime proponent of Moore's law for advances in semiconductor manufacturing. While Intel's server processor business has benefited from the shift to the cloud, the firm has also been expanding into new adjacencies as the personal computer market has declined. These include areas such as the Internet of Things, memory, artificial intelligence, and automotive. Intel has been active on the merger and acquisitions front, recently acquiring Altera, Mobileye, Nervana, and Movidius in order to assist its efforts in non-PC arenas.

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing is the world's largest dedicated chip foundry, with over 50% market share in 2017 (according to IC Insights). TSMC was founded in 1987 as a joint venture of Philips, the government of Taiwan, and private investors. It went public as an ADR in the U.S. in 1997. TSMC's scale and high-quality technology allow the firm to generate solid operating margins, even in the highly competitive foundry business. Furthermore, the shift to the fabless business model has created tailwinds for TSMC. The foundry leader has an illustrious customer base, including Apple and Nvidia, that looks to apply cutting-edge process technologies to its semiconductor designs.

Cisco Systems Inc is the world's largest hardware and software supplier within the networking solutions sector. The infrastructure platforms group includes hardware and software products for switching, routing, data center, and wireless applications. Its applications portfolio contains collaboration, analytics, and Internet of Things products. The security segment contains Cisco's firewall and software-defined security products. Services are Cisco's technical support and advanced services offerings. The company's wide array of hardware is complemented with solutions for software-defined networking, analytics, and intent-based networking. In collaboration with Cisco's initiative on growing software and services, its revenue model is focused on increasing subscriptions and recurring sales.

Oracle Corp sells a wide range of enterprise IT solutions, including databases, middleware, applications, and hardware. While software licenses, support, and maintenance continue to represent roughly 70% of revenue, the firm is undergoing a mix shift toward cloud-based subscriptions that should necessitate continued heavy investment in the business model transition. Oracle offers software-as-a-service, platform-as-a-service, and infrastructure-as-a-service offerings. Legacy offerings include Oracle Database software and Oracle Fusion Middleware.

SAP is a global software vendor providing solutions for enterprise resource planning, database management, business intelligence, and vertical-specific software. Its flagship software products run on SAP's HANA database technology. In fiscal 2017, the company generated roughly 44% of revenue from Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, 40% from the Americas, and 16% from Asia.

Salesforce.com provides enterprise cloud computing solutions, including Sales Cloud, the company's main customer relationship management software-as-a-service product. Salesforce.com also offers Service Cloud for customer support, Marketing Cloud for digital marketing campaigns, Commerce Cloud as an e-commerce engine, the Salesforce Platform, which allows enterprises to build applications, and other solutions, such as MuleSoft for data integration.

Adobe provides content creation, document management, and digital marketing and advertising software and services to creative professionals and marketers for creating, managing, delivering, measuring, optimizing and engaging with compelling content multiple operating systems, devices and media. The company operates with three segments: digital media content creation, digital experience for marketing solutions, and publishing for legacy products (less than 5% of revenue).

IBM is an IT behemoth with an operating history of more than a century. The company's offerings span a range of services, software, and hardware. IBM operates on a global scale, with operations in over 170 countries; it generates a little more than half of its revenue outside the Americas. The company has an entrenched position globally within the largest multinational firms, providing an end-to-end portfolio that helps enterprises plan, build, manage, and maintain IT infrastructure, platforms, applications, and services.

Accenture is a leading provider of management consulting, technology services, and outsourcing. The firm is truly global, with operations in over 120 countries and roughly 450,000 employees. The company has extensive industry experience and relationships with many market leading firms, and 94 of the Fortune Global 100 companies and more than 80% of the Fortune Global 500 companies work with Accenture. While the firm is headquartered in Dublin, Ireland, the majority of operations are conducted via New York and Chicago.

Texas Instruments Inc is a Dallas-based generates about 95% of its revenue from semiconductors and the remainder from its well-known calculators. Texas Instruments is the world's largest maker of analog chips, which are used to process real-world signals such as sound and power. Texas Instruments also has a leading market share position in digital signal processors, used in wireless communications, and microcontrollers used in a wide variety of electronics applications.

Broadcom--the combined entity of Broadcom and Avago--boasts a highly diverse product portfolio across an array of end markets. Avago focused primarily on radio frequency filters and amplifiers used in high-end smartphones, such as the Apple iPhone and Samsung Galaxy devices, in addition to an assortment of solutions for wired infrastructure, enterprise storage, and industrial end markets. Legacy Broadcom targeted networking semiconductors, such as switch and physical layer chips, broadband products (such as television set-top box processors), and connectivity chips that handle standards such as Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. The company recently acquired Brocade and CA Technologies to bolster its offerings in enterprise storage and mainframe software, respectively.

Nvidia is a leading designer of graphics chips that enhance the experience on computing platforms. The firm's chips are used in a variety of end markets, including high-end PCs for gaming, data centers, and automotive infotainment systems. In recent years, the firm has broadened its focus from traditional PC graphics applications such as gaming to more complex and favorable opportunities, including artificial intelligence and autonomous driving, which leverage the high-performance capabilities of the firm's graphics processing units.

Founded in 1984 and based in the Netherlands, ASML is a leading manufacturer of photolithography systems used in the production of semiconductors. Photolithography is the process in which a light source is used to expose circuit patterns from a photomask onto a semiconductor wafer. ASML's products are used at every major semiconductor manufacturer, including Intel, Samsung, and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing.

Qualcomm develops and licenses wireless technology and also designs chips for smartphones. The company's key patents revolve around CDMA and OFDMA technologies, which are standards in wireless communications that are the backbone of all 3G and 4G networks. The firm is poised to be a leader in 5G as well. Qualcomm's IP is licensed by virtually all wireless device makers. The firm is also the world's largest wireless chip vendor, supplying many premier handset makers with leading-edge processors.

Sony Corp is a conglomerate with consumer electronics roots and various well-known brand names, such as Walkman in portable audio players, Vaio in PCs, Xperia in smartphones, Cybershot and Alpha in digital cameras, and PlayStation in video game consoles. It currently has nine main business units, operating electronic appliances, games, devices and semiconductors, entertainment content, and financial services.

Automatic Data Processing Inc competes in the human resources administration services industry. It provides services that satisfy companies' human resources needs, such as payroll processing and benefits administration. ADP was founded in 1949 and has its headquarters in Roseland, New Jersey. It serves more than 650,000 clients and has 57,000 employees worldwide.

Intuit develops and markets well-known and trusted software products such as QuickBooks for small-business accounting, TurboTax for preparing personal tax returns, and Mint for managing personal finances. The firm is targeting the additional needs of small businesses with payroll and payment processing products in addition to growing its self-employed user base. Intuit was founded in 1983 and is based in Mountain View, California.

VMware, a majority-owned subsidiary of Dell, is an industry leader in virtual machines for data center servers and computer desktops. The software provider operates in the three segments of licenses, maintenance, and professional services. Customers include enterprises utilizing data centers, end-user computing, cloud providers, and software-defined networking. The Palo Alto, California, firm operates and sells on a global scale, with about half its revenue from the United States, through direct sales, distributors, and partnerships.

S&P Global is not only the world's largest provider of credit ratings and indexes, it offers complimentary data, research, and analytical tools to capital market participants. Within credit ratings, S&P is the largest of the big three nationally recognized statistical rating organizations alongside Moody's and Fitch. S&P accounted for around 49% of bond ratings tracked by the SEC the past two years, modestly more than its chief rival, Moody's, with 34%. Combined with Fitch, these three firms have ratings on more than 95% of the market.

Micron has historically focused on providing DRAM for PCs and servers. The firm has expanded into the NAND flash memory market over the past decade. It increased its DRAM scale with the purchase of Elpida (completed in mid-2013) and Inotera (completed in December 2016).

Infosys is a global provider of consulting and IT services. The company was founded in 1981, employs more than 200,000 staff, and serves clients in over 50 countries. Infosys provides a raft of services such as management consulting, application and infrastructure management, application outsourcing, and business process outsourcing, to name a few. The firm serves more than 20 industries ranging from aerospace and defense to financial services, health care, and the public sector.

Applied Materials is one of the world's largest suppliers of semiconductor manufacturing equipment, providing materials engineering solutions to help make nearly every chip in the world. The firm's systems are used in every process step with the exception of lithography. Key tools include those for chemical and physical vapor deposition, etching, chemical mechanical polishing, wafer- and reticle-inspection, critical dimension measurement, and defect-inspection scanning electron microscopes.

ServiceNow Inc provides software solutions to structure and automate various business processes via a SaaS delivery model. The company primarily focuses on the IT function for enterprise customers. ServiceNow began with IT service management (ITSM), expanded within the IT function, and more recently directed its workflow automation logic to functional areas beyond IT, notably customer service, HR service delivery, and security operations. ServiceNow also offers an application development platform as a service (PaaS).

Analog Devices is a leading analog, mixed signal, and digital signal processing chipmaker. The firm has a significant market share lead in converter chips, which are used to translate analog signals to digital and vice versa. The company serves tens of thousands of customers, and more than half of its chip sales are made to industrial and automotive end markets. Analog Devices' chips are also incorporated into wireless infrastructure equipment.

Activision Blizzard was formed in 2008 by the merger of Activision, one of the largest console video game publishers, and Blizzard, one of largest PC video game publishers. The combined firm remains one of the world's largest video game publishers. Activision's impressive franchise portfolio includes World of Warcraft, which boasts more than $8 billion of lifetime sales, and Call of Duty, which has sold over 175 million copies across 14 titles over 12 years.

Shopify offers an e-commerce platform primarily to small and midsize businesses. The firm has two segments: subscription solutions (43% of fiscal 2018 revenue) and merchant solutions (57% of fiscal 2018 revenue). The subscription solutions segment allows Shopify merchants to conduct e-commerce on a variety of platforms, including the company's website, physical stores, pop-up stores, kiosks, social networks (Facebook), and Amazon. Merchant solutions are add-on products for the platform that facilitate e-commerce and include Shopify Pay, Shopify Shipping, and Shopify Capital.

Moody's is the world's second- largest provider of credit ratings, trailing only S&P Global. The company provides ratings on more than a third of the total bond ratings in existence. Within ratings, roughly half of its revenue is derived from corporate issuers, while the rest of its corporate ratings are split among financial institutions, structured products, and public institutions. Moody's Analytics (13.5% of operating income) provides ancillary software and data solutions to issuers and investors. In 2017, the company bought Bureau van Dijk, a provider of private company data, for $3.5 billion to bolster its efforts in analytics.

Dell Technologies, born from Dell's 2016 acquisition of EMC, is a leading provider of servers and storage products through its ISG segment; PCs, monitors, and peripherals via its CSG division; and virtualization software through VMware. Its brands include Dell, Dell EMC, VMware, Boomi, Pivotal, RSA Security, Secureworks, and Virtustream. The company focuses on supplementing its traditional mainstream servers and PCs with hardware and software products for hybrid-cloud environments. The Texas-based company employs around 145,000 people and sells into 180 countries.

Workday is a software-as-a-service provider that offers enterprise resource planning software for medium and large enterprises. The firm's roots are in ERP software vendor PeopleSoft, which was founded by Workday cofounder David Duffield, while fellow Workday cofounder Aneel Bhusri served as vice chairman at PeopleSoft. The company's product portfolio is centered on human capital and financial management software, though it continues to add new applications to the product set. Just over 75% of the firm's revenue comes from the U.S.

Cognizant is an IT services provider with headquarters in Teaneck, New Jersey. The company was founded in 1994, employs close to 280,000 people, and provides such services as technology consulting, application outsourcing, systems integration, business process services, and cloud services. The firm generates approximately 77% of group revenue from the North American market and roughly 90% of group revenue from its three main industries: financial services, healthcare and manufacturing, retail and logistics.

NetEase, which started on an Internet portal service in 1997, is a leading online services provider in China. Its key services include online/mobile games, media, email, and e-commerce. The company develops and operates some of the China's most popular PC client and mobile games, and it partners with global leading game developers, such as Blizzard Entertainment and Mojang (a Microsoft subsidiary). Since 2014, NetEase has rolled out e-commerce services, riding the tailwind of increased demand for high-quality products.

Autodesk Inc is a leading provider of computer-aided design software. The company was founded on its flagship product, AutoCAD, in 1982. Since then, Autodesk has built a broad product portfolio catering to multiple industries such as architecture, engineering, construction, manufacturing, and media. The company serves more than 200 million customers globally, spanning designers, engineers, architects, and students, among others.

Lam Research Corp manufactures equipment used to fabricate semiconductors. The firm is focused on the etch, deposition, and clean markets, which are key steps in the semiconductor manufacturing process, especially for 3D NAND flash storage, advanced DRAM, and leading-edge logic/foundry chipmakers. Lam's flagship Kiyo, Vector, and Sabre products are sold in all major geographies to key customers such as Samsung Electronics and TSMC.

Advanced Micro Devices designs and produces microprocessors and low-power processor solutions for the computer and consumer electronics industries. The majority of the firm's sales are in the computer market via CPUs and GPUs. AMD acquired graphics processor and chipset maker ATI in 2006 in an effort to improve its positioning in the PC food chain. In 2009, the firm spun out its manufacturing operations to form a foundry joint venture, GlobalFoundries.

NXP Semiconductors is a leading supplier high performance mixed signal products. The firm acquired Freescale Semiconductors in 2015 and now has significant market share in automotive market where it supplies microcontrollers and analog chips into automotive clusters, powertrains, infotainment systems, and radars. NXP Semiconductors also serves industrial and Internet of Things, mobile, and communications infrastructure.