What we mapped
Every research report in the Zen Horizon library closes by naming the other public companies that appear in its argument — suppliers, customers, competitors, valuation comps. Since we began storing those references in structured form, 680 of our 1,068 reports carry a machine-readable mention list. This report treats the lists as a directed network: 680 reports pointing 4,010 times at 1,623 distinct companies across 183 industry labels. Cross-listings are merged into one identity (Alphabet's two share classes count once; WuXi AppTec's Shanghai and Hong Kong lines count once), self-references are dropped, and ETF and index tickers are excluded. Data was pulled from the production database on 2026-07-26.
Two structural facts frame everything below. The typical report names about six other companies, and the biggest spiders in the web are the industry-chain surveys — our AI data-center infrastructure survey alone names 21. And the network is extremely top-heavy: 879 of the 1,623 mentioned companies (54%) are named exactly once, while the 39 companies with ten or more mentions absorb 696 references — 17% of all edges flowing into 2.4% of the names.
One caveat belongs up front: the 388 reports published before the structured contract existed contribute no edges, so every count in this report is a floor, and the floors rise as the library back-fills.
The four gravity centers
| Company | Mentions | Industries | Own reports |
|---|---|---|---|
| NVIDIA | 56 | 27 | 2 |
| Microsoft | 47 | 30 | 1 |
| Alphabet | 44 | 30 | 1 |
| Amazon | 41 | 31 | 1 |
| Tesla | 25 | 15 | 6 |
| TSMC | 25 | 13 | 1 |
NVIDIA is named by one networked report in twelve, and those reports come from 27 different industries — utilities, robotics, pharma, optics, shipping. Amazon has the widest industry spread of all, 31, which fits a company that is simultaneously a cloud vendor, a retailer, a logistics network and an advertising platform. Below the big four the curve breaks: the gap between Amazon at 41 and Tesla at 25 is the largest single drop in the ranking.
Two details in this table are easy to miss. First, Apple: 16 mentions from 14 industries, and none of them from a subject scoring 50 or higher on our Growth Score. In this map Apple reads as a customer that supply chains sell to, rather than infrastructure their theses depend on. Second, the weighting among the leaders shifts once you ask who the strongest companies name: among mentions coming from subjects scoring 50+, Microsoft leads with 11, ahead of NVIDIA's 9 and Alphabet's 8. The best growth stories in our library lean on Microsoft's platforms at least as much as on NVIDIA's chips.
The table also exposes a coverage inversion we intend to fix: 56 mentions of NVIDIA rest on just two reports of our own, while 25 mentions of Tesla rest on six. Our library grew from the edges inward, and the center deserves more direct work than it has received.
Chokepoints: depth without breadth
A mention can mean two different things, and the industry-spread column separates them. Duke Energy is named by ten reports — every one of them another utility using Duke as a valuation comp. Merck is named by fourteen reports from three industries — oncology developers, CDMO manufacturers, diagnostics firms — stories that have to plan around Merck as partner, acquirer or trial combination. The first pattern is a peer group; the second is a chokepoint.
| Company | Mentions | Industries | Which chain names it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Merck | 14 | 3 | Oncology, CDMO, diagnostics |
| Applied Materials | 12 | 4 | AI compute, advanced packaging, equipment |
| Pfizer | 12 | 4 | Pharma, CRO/CDMO, AI drug discovery |
| Bristol Myers Squibb | 10 | 3 | Computational drug discovery, CRO, pharma |
| Franco-Nevada | 9 | 4 | Gold, silver, royalty peers |
| Newmont | 9 | 4 | Precious-metals chain |
| Airbus | 8 | 2 | Aerospace & defense, industrial robotics |
| Tokyo Electron | 8 | 3 | Semi equipment, electronic materials |
| Centrus Energy | 8 | 3 | Nuclear fuel cycle |
| NuScale Power | 8 | 4 | Nuclear, defense, utilities |
Three clusters dominate. Big pharma is the universal counterparty of every biotech story — behind Merck, Pfizer and Bristol Myers Squibb sit Novartis at 9 mentions and AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson at 8 each. Semiconductor equipment forms the second cluster, with Applied Materials, Lam Research, Tokyo Electron and Teradyne all drawing 8 to 12 mentions from the AI-hardware chain. The third is newer: the nuclear-fuel bottleneck, where enricher Centrus and SMR designer NuScale each collect 8 mentions from reports on utilities, uranium miners and defense.
Every company in this table already has a report in the library. The chokepoints are covered. The holes are elsewhere.
The four holes
Finding true gaps required an identity pass first. In the raw list of "most-mentioned companies without a report," six of the top ten were cross-listing artifacts: ASML's Amsterdam line while we cover the Nasdaq listing, Rheinmetall's Frankfurt ticker while we cover Xetra, WuXi AppTec's A-shares while we cover the H-shares. After merging identities, exactly four companies are named four or more times and genuinely have no report:
| Company | Ticker | Mentions | Named by |
|---|---|---|---|
| Nexans | NEX.PA | 5 | All five of our cable reports |
| NKT | NKT.CO | 5 | The same five |
| Dentsply Sirona | XRAY.US | 4 | Solventum, Henry Schein, Straumann, Envista |
| Hensoldt | HAG.DE | 4 | Kongsberg, Thales, Leonardo, Saab |
The cable case is the cleanest signal in the whole dataset. Prysmian, Sumitomo Electric, Furukawa Electric, Fujikura and Ningbo Orient — every wire-and-cable maker we cover, across three countries — name both Nexans and NKT, the French and Danish anchors of Europe's high-voltage grid build-out. When five competitors independently name the same two absentees, the absentees are load-bearing. Hensoldt shows the same shape in defense electronics, named by four European primes we covered within a single week in July; Dentsply Sirona is named by every dental-adjacent report in the library, including the Envista report published the same day as this map.
One tier down, at three mentions, the pattern holds — European industrials plus med-tech, with a biotech pair attached: BAE Systems (our own Leonardo report frames its thesis around "the quality gap to BAE and Thales," and BAE is the half of that pair we haven't written), Siemens Healthineers, Rohm, Arkema, BHP, and the bispecific-antibody pair of Summit Therapeutics — Akeso's ex-China partner for ivonescimab — and Innovent Biologics, both named by the Chinese oncology cluster around our Akeso report. Notice what the gap list does not contain: a single US megacap. The blind spot of this library sits in Europe.
The islands
The inverse cut is just as telling. Of the 987 companies we cover, 236 — one in four — are never named by any of the 680 networked reports. Isolation is a shape, and mostly an honest one: single-market consumer names, regional banks and utilities researched as standalone stories. But a covered company that no adjacent report ever names gets its thesis stress-tested less often, because no neighboring analysis drags it back on stage. The mention count is worth a glance before trusting any single-name conviction, ours included.
How to read and cite this map
Three caveats belong next to every number above. First, coverage: only 64% of the library carries structured mention data, so all counts are floors. Second, perspective: mentions are harvested from our own reports, so the map describes our library's world-view, and a company we never mention may simply sit in a chain we never wrote about. Third, meaning: a mention is a dependency claim only when it crosses industries; within one industry it is usually a valuation comp, which is why the industry-spread column appears in every table.
The gap list is already operational — Nexans, NKT, Dentsply Sirona and Hensoldt all sit in our research production queue as pending work, and the next edition will report which holes were filled. The map will be redrawn quarterly, alongside the Growth Score Index, with the next edition due in October 2026. Cite these figures as "Zen Horizon Mention Map, July 2026 (zh.app/research)". This is a statistic about research coverage; it does not constitute investment advice.
NVIDIANVDAMicrosoftMSFTAlphabetGOOGLAmazonAMZNTSMC2330MerckMRKApplied MaterialsAMATPrysmianPRYThalesHOAkeso9926