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Our Company of the Year isn’t necessarily the company of the decade.
Costco (COST) is the 11th annual Yahoo Finance Company of the Year (COTY). And a deserving one. But a look back at the list of prior winners contains a sobering lesson: greatness doesn’t always last.
Our first COTY selection, for example, was Gap (GPS), in 2012. Believe it or not, the denim retailer was enjoying a resurgence back then, with the stock surging from 2011 to 2014. Since then, however, Gap has become the poster child for the old-school retail apocalypse, closing hundreds of stores, churning through CEOs and even inking a regrettable deal with one of the incarnations of Kanye West. Since peaking in 2014, the shares are down nearly 70%.
Another stumbler, our 2013 selection, Disney (DIS), is still a blue-chip firm. But it hit a rough patch under the leadership of now-departed CEO Bob Chapek. His predecessor, Bob Iger, is now at the helm once more, and he has a lot of fixing to do. Profits are well below pre-Covid levels and the stock is down 35% this year, more than twice the drop in the S&P 500 stock index.
Then there's former high rider Under Armour (UA). It seemed poised to become the next Nike when it claimed the 2014 best-company title. But it missed the athleisure trend, lost high-profile endorsers and endured management problems. The company's value, meanwhile, has dropped from a peak of $22 billion in 2015 to less than $4 billion today.
Another disappointment: Facebook (META), our 2015 winner. In 2021, Yahoo Finance readers face-palmed the company, now Meta, by voting it worst company of the year. What irked investors then was a stream of controversy over Facebook allowing bogus content on the site and/or blocking certain political points of view. This year’s woes include a wrong turn into the “metaverse,” where nobody except CEO Mark Zuckerberg wants to hang out. The company laid off 11,000 workers in November, and the stock is down 67% from its 2021 peak. Once a rare trillion-dollar company, Meta is now worth less than $300 billion.
Other Company of the Year setbacks?
Square (SQ), our 2018 winner, began to focus on cryptocurrency a couple years later, eventually changing its name to Block—as in blockchain. From 2020 to 2021, Square/Block rode the crypto boom up. Then, this year, it rode the crypto bust right back down. Shares soared in 2021, then plunged in 2022, and they’re now around where they were before the move into crypto. Block is back to Square 1.
And when we picked Zoom (ZOOM) in 2020, we wondered whether the "meme" darling of the COVID lockdown era would maintain its momentum once COVID faded and people went back to work. Turns out, not. Zoom had an epic year in 2020, with the stock up nearly 400%. Since then, however, it’s down 87%%. Zoom out.