In 2021, the aggregate turnover of the 25 largest WebSofts in the world reached €1,584bn, equal to 90% of Italy’s GDP. Perhaps the last flare of the sector. In a long-established framework of forces, the United States and China have shared almost all of the revenues: 67% of WebSoft’s revenues were generated by the US giants, 28% by the Chinese ones and only 5% by groups of other Villages. The trend emerged from an annual survey carried out by Mediobanca.
The pandemic has further highlighted the growth speed gap between WebSoft and multinational manufacturing companies: while the former accelerated revenues (+50% for 2019-2021), the latter only recorded +7.6%. Turnover is increasingly concentrated: the top three players, Amazon, Alphabet and Microsoft, account for half of aggregate revenues, with Amazon (€414.8bn, of which 50.9% generated by retail), in first place position since 2014, which alone concentrates over a quarter. WebSoft multinationals continue to shine for industrial profitability. With an EBIT margin of 15.8% in 2021, they are in third place in the sector comparison after pharmaceuticals (24.1%) and telcos (15.9%). However, if we focus exclusively on the digital core and exclude e-commerce, their ebit margin soars to 25.8%, outperforming all other industrial sectors. At the end of 2021, the WebSoft workforce numbered almost four million people worldwide, an increase of over one million units on 2019, of which +810,000 from Amazon alone, the undisputed queen in terms of number of employees: 1,608,000 at the end of 2021 .