Try these example inputs in the Market cap calculator.
These figures match this guide's worked example. They are illustrative. They stay on this device and never appear in the URL.
Market capitalization (or "market cap") is what the stock market says a company's shares are worth in total. You calculate it by multiplying the share price by the number of shares outstanding. It is the standard way to measure how big a public company is, and it is the number that orders every row in the MarketCapLens ranking.
Key takeaways
The formula is short:
Market cap = share price × shares outstanding
So if a company trades at $200 a share and has 1.5 billion shares outstanding, its market cap is $300 billion ($200 × 1.5B). Share prices move all day, so market cap does too. That is exactly why a ranking by market cap keeps reshuffling. Run the same math with your own numbers in the market cap calculator. To ask what share price a target cap would imply, use the implied share price calculator.
The arithmetic is the same on a live name. Apple is share price times shares outstanding — whatever those two figures are today is the market cap on that page, with an as-of date. It will not match a number you remember from last month. SK hynix is the same formula on a U.S.-listed ADR rather than a U.S. corporation; it still ranks here because it trades on a major American exchange above the size floor.
Count the share unit that matches the price you are multiplying. An ADR can represent several ordinary shares, or a fraction of one. Dual-class listings quote each class at its own price. Mixing an ADR price with the home-market ordinary share count, or adding two classes that already sit inside a combined company total, double-counts or understates size. The market cap calculator can convert an ADR ratio and add a second class when you type both.
There is one wrinkle worth knowing. Plenty of large companies issue more than one class of shares, such as a voting and a non-voting class. To value the whole business you add up every class. On MarketCapLens, a company's share classes are combined so it appears once, at its true size — see dual-class shares and market cap.
Market cap lets you compare companies with very different share prices on equal footing. A $500 stock is not "more expensive" than a $50 stock in any way that matters; what counts is the combined value of all the shares. (That trips up a lot of people, so we gave it its own guide.)
Size often lines up with how widely a name trades, but that is a tendency, not a rule. The conventional bands, from mega-cap down to micro-cap, are laid out in the size tiers. For industry groupings, see what a sector is.
Market cap values a company's equity and nothing else. Two things it quietly ignores can matter a lot:
To fold both into the picture, investors turn to enterprise value. We put the two side by side in Market Cap vs. Enterprise Value.
Market cap is also silent on profits, growth, and quality. Two companies of the same size can earn wildly different amounts. Think of market cap as a measure of size and market sentiment, not a verdict on whether a stock is worth buying.
For general education only. Nothing here is investment advice.
Formulas and worked examples are MarketCapLens's. See who checks the numbers.