Thursday, January 7, 2016

Metros With Most S&P 500 Headquarters


About 64% of the companies in the S&P 500 are based in or near the top 15 MSAs, even though those regions account for just over 1/3rd of all jobs.  Moreover, the index includes some overseas corporations, so the top 15's share of domestically-HQ'd companies is closer to 70%.   As I mentioned in the last post, about 80% of all jobs being created now are in face-to-face professions...from waiters to doctors to bikini waxers.   But the S&P companies listed here are the ones creating high paying jobs, from programmers to financial analysts, that don't require face-to-face customer contact, and often distinguish one region from another.

NY and the Bay Area own the list.   I didn't look at revenue growth, but I would imagine the Bay Area blows away NY here.   In addition to financial providers, the Tri-State area is heavy on consumer, media, and advertising including Estee Lauder, Colgate-Palmolive, and Omnicom.   The Bay Area must have 90% share of the companies Jim Cramer screams about (both happily and angrily), with Charles Schwab, Visa, and Wells Fargo joining many of the well-known tech companies based in or near San Francisco.

Bay Area companies are worth over $4 trillion out of the $20 trillion U.S. total capitalization.   And this share is likely to grow along with the revenue of the many tech companies based there.   Seattle has over half a trillion of market value across just Microsoft and Amazon, but the other nine companies based in that region include Nordstrom, Weyerhauser, Costco, and Starbucks, and are mostly in other sectors of the economy.

Unsurprisingly, Houston is dominated by energy, and the only other region running a little high for its size is Boston, which houses a mix of industries including TripAdvisor, Akamai, Staples, Biogen, and State Street Financial.  Its about to lose its biggest tech representative, EMC, as the storage provider is in the process of being acquired by Dell.


NY Tri-State
88
SF Bay
47
Houston
24
Chicago
24
Boston
20
Dallas
19
LA + IE
16
DC Metro
15
Minneapolis
14
Atlanta
13
Seattle
11
Philly 
10
Detroit 
7
Miami + Ft L + WPB
7
Phoenix
5