Broadcom

Broadcom matters most to the people who build phones, servers and networks, because its chips and infrastructure software sit inside the plumbing rather than on the surface. By our assessment, it is especially strong in semiconductors for connectivity, storage and networking, and in the software it bought around enterprise infrastructure. The trade-off is that this is not a friendly consumer brand: it is a component-and-platform company, so its work is visible only when devices and datacentres are built around it. In practice that means fewer shiny features and more invisible dependence on the parts that make systems move data fast. It sits near the top of the enterprise and networking stack, well away from the sort of company that sells directly to ordinary shoppers. Broadcom is for people who care about what powers the machine, not the face it shows.