Living well on less isn’t just about spending less. It’s also understanding where your money is going and who is making the things you touch everyday. As I look into some of the biggest names I’ve never heard of I’m continually shocked. Check out our latest infographic on the multinational giants that just don’t care if you know their names or not. For me, the most impressive is the Taiwanese computer hardware producer, Quanta Computer. Quanta controls a huge marketshare and hauls in annual revenues higher than Amazon and Coca-Cola, but since they don’t carry many branded products, we simply don’t think of them as a sprawling multinational. Just consider that if you owned or gifted a Kindle Fire last year, it was manufactured at a Quanta plant in East Asia. And for those of you who follow my blog on a notebook by Apple, Compaq, Dell HP, or Lenovo, there’s a high chance that some component of your laptop came from Quanta.
I’m not worried that Quanta is cornering a market right under our nose, but I do feel embarrassed that a company I have probably supported with just about every personal tech purchase of the last five years is one that I never could’ve named before today. Understanding the market realities in which we’re spending and saving makes savvy customers more of a force to be reckoned with by even the largest companies. It’s worth all of our time to learn about the companies we’re spending our hard-earned money on. Check out this fascinating infographic on the six insanely large companies that (if you’re like me) you just aren’t thinking about.