Tech, media companies created most value for shareholders, study says

STR | AFP | Getty Images

Visitors crowd around the Nvidia booth at the 2016 China Digital Entertainment Expo, known as ChinaJoy, in Shanghai.

If you made a lot of money in the public markets over the past five years, you were probably betting big on tech and media.

That’s according to a new global study from the Boston Consulting Group, which said last week that the nine companies with the highest shareholder returns from 2013 to 2017 came from those two sectors. Chipmaker Nvidia was first, followed by Netflix, Broadcom, China’s Tencent and Facebook.

“We have not seen such a dominance of effectively two sectors—technology and media and publishing—over the 20-year history” of this research, said Alexander Roos, a senior partner at BCG, in a press release on July 6. “It clearly shows how technology, data and content have become the most critical resources for value creation.”

BCG, in its Value Creators study, measures total shareholder return, or TSR, by taking the capital appreciation of a stock and adding in dividends. Kweichow Moutai, a Chinese producer and seller of distilled liquor products, ranked 10th and was tops among companies outside of tech and media.

The study ranked the five-year average TSR of 2,425 global companies. The top 10 companies on the list produced a five-year average TSR of 49 percent, led by Nvidia at 76 percent and Netflix at 71 percent.