TCS market-cap more than the GDP of these countries

NEW DELHI: Tata's IT arm, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) on Monday became the second Indian company ever (after Reliance Industries) to cross the $100 billion dollar-mark or Rs 6,80,912 crore. Terming the "digital era" as a huge oppurtunity for TCS, chief N Chandrasekaran said that the company has been "able to create value consistently by making the right investments."
At the time of writing this story, the market valuation of TCS stood at around $98 billion (Rs 6,46,072 crore).
With its record-high market capitalisation, TCS has joined the elite club of 63 companies with m-cap of more than $100 billion. Social networking giant Facebook, Jeff Bezos' Amazon, Apple, IBM, Microsoft, Alphabet (Google) are a few ones to name from the list. It also in the process to overtake the market cap of Accenture, a company whose revenue is almost twice that of TCS.
Here are some interesting facts to put things in perspective:
* TCS' market cap is more than the GDP (Gross Domestic Product) of more than 120 countries. Countries like Ecuador, Slovakia, Kenya, Luxembourg, Costa Rica, Bulgaria, Belarus and Sri Lanka have their GDP less than the $100 billion-mark.
* The IT major's m-cap bigger than the Pakistan Stock Exchange. The market valuation of the listed firms there amount to $80 billion.
* The m-cap of TCS is almost one-fourth of the country's foreign exchange reserves. According to the Reserve Bank of India's (RBI) weekly statistical supplement, the overall forex reserves rose to $426.08 billion from $424.86 billion reported for the week ended April 6.
* TCS holds around 62 per cent of the Tata Group's listed stocks' market value.
* IBM remains the No. 1 in the IT services market cap pecking order, but its market cap is only about 33% higher than that of TCS, though its revenue is more than 300% higher.
* TCS' m-cap is equal to defence budgets of India and Japan combined. India overtook the UK as the fifth-largest defence spender in the world in 2017 at $52.5 billion. Japan has approved $45 billion in defence budget for FY19.