Page 107 - Critical Political Economy of the Media

86 Critical investigations in political economy

such as Google and Apple combine all three while remaining principally media
content distributors rather than content creators.
The seven largest global conglomerates by media content origination are Vivendi,
Walt Disney, Comcast, News Corporation [from 2013 two separate conglomerates],
Time Warner, Sony, Bertelsmann. In 2010 Comcast was the largest media
group (dominant in the US cable market) with revenues of $35.6bn, followed by
Google ($29.3bn) and Disney ($27.3bn), the third largest company. By 2011,
Google was the largest firm, according to Zenith Optimedia (2013), whose listing
of the top ten global media companies (by revenues derived from activities that
support advertising) was:

Google $37.9bn
Direct TV Group $27.2bn
News Corporation $26.4bn
Walt Disney $19.7bn
Comcast $16.2bn
Time Warner $15.6bn
Bertelsmann $11.3bn
Cox Enterprises $11.1bn
CBS Corporation $10.8bn
BSkyB $10.2bn.

In fact, the increasingly networked relations between mega-corporations are best
captured by examining linkages between multimedia companies, telecommuni-
cations firms, converged communications infrastructure firms, Internet content
companies, gaming and entertainment and leisure businesses (Winseck and Jin
2012).
Another key ranking by revenue ($ millions), the Fortune Global 500 (2013), based
on figures from July 2012, places the highest ranking communications company,
Nippon Telegraph and Telephone (NTT), at 29 (133,077), followed by AT&T
at 32 (126,723) with Verizon at 50 (110,875), Apple at 55 (108,249), China
Mobile Communications at 81 (87,544), Sony at 87 (82,237), Microsoft at 119
(69,943), Amazon 206 (48,077), Walt Disney 249 (40,893), Vivendi 257 (40,063),
Google 277 (37,905), News Corp 332 (33,405), Time Warner 381 (28,974), Direct
TV 406 (27,226) and Bertelsmann 492 (22,427). Other telecommunications com-
panies include Telecom Italia 244 (42,070) and BT group 358 (30,734). As this
listing shows, Japan’s NTT is the world’s largest telecommunications company,
with powerful players from China rising up the rankings. Yet a critical charge
remains salient, that conglomerates with US headquarters also dominate the
‘global oligopoly’. Of the top fifty audiovisual companies in 2010, with total
revenues of $470.5 billion, half were based in the United States, followed by
companies with headquarters in Japan (7) and the UK (5). France and Germany
each had three top tier companies, Italy two and the remainder were single
entries Luxembourg, Brazil, Mexico, China and Canada (Wescott 2011). The