Caterpillar doesn’t make giant earthmoving machinery. Exxon Mobil doesn’t sell gas. Home Depot doesn’t provide lumber and lawn mowers. Rather, they build relationships with customers — and solve people’s problems.
Increasingly, that’s via mobile.
In fact, mobile leaders in the F1000 grow market value 15% faster than mobile laggards, and are 1.9X more likely to be financially successful. Caterpillar has 355,000 mobile-app-using customers; Exxon Mobil, over 400,000. And Home Depot? A massive 17.7 million. These companies are financial winners, capturing outsized stock price growth.
Why?
They connect with customers one-on-one at scale, giving them unmediated and instant communication channels: an unparalleled advantage over their competitors.
Sure, Google, Facebook, and Amazon lead the pack.
Google has over 73 billion mobile users in aggregate, and Facebook has just over 6 billion. Both grew fast in 2016: 18.5% and 35.4%, respectively. And Amazon, with more than 4X the number of mobile users than the entire rest of the retail industry, captured almost $102 billion more stock price growth than its competitors.