Apple Surpasses Dell's Market Value

bonch writes "Nine years after Michael Dell said he'd shut down Apple and give the money to the shareholders, Apple has passed Dell in market value, at $72,132,428,843 compared to Dell's $71,970,702,760. Analysts expect Apple to continue to outperform competitors, citing 2006 as 'poised to be the year of both iPod growth and, more importantly, Mac market share gains,' with earnings growing more than 35%. I should have bought stock two years ago!" We talked about the approach of this moment back in November of last year.

Comments

Price Earning Ratio is What Really Matters

[xoip]

Before you run out and buy your new Apple shares take a look at the P/E ratios.
Apple 54.87
Dell 23.71
The run up in the price at Apple while, commendable is predicated on the hype around iPod and the assumption that will translate into sales of desktop machines.
Tons of reasons to have concern.

Current Snapshot

[oilisgood]

It is interesting to note also that Apple is near its 52week high. And Dell is near its 52week low.

Apple

Price & Volume
Recent Price $ 85.59
52 Week High $ 86.40
52 Week Low $ 33.11
Avg Daily Vol (Mil) 25.269
Beta 1.403

Dell

Price & Volume
Recent Price $ 30.58
52 Week High $ 41.99
52 Week Low $ 28.62
Avg Daily Vol (Mil) 22.084
Beta 1.08

Re:Current Snapshot

[luvirini]

And funny thing too.. both partly because of Intel...

Dell under pressure specially in the serverspace because they do not use AMD processors.. and Apple because the switched to Intel..

Ofcourse the reasons go much deeper than that, including increased competition from even cheaper manufacturers from Asia for Dell and iPods for Apple and many other things.. But just wanted to reflect on the irony of Intel being a problem for one and good thing for other...

Re:Times Change

[deep44]

I don't know - but Jobs clearly has something he doesn't (apart from the emotional attachment to Apple).

Correct, he has charisma. I couldn't pick Michael Dell out of a lineup if my life depended on it, yet I went out of my way to follow the Jobs keynote online the other day. That's the difference.

An even better quote from Michael Dell on Apple..

[cowmix]

Business Week... April 16th 2001:
Q: That bad?
A: Maybe it's a little bit different. But if you look at proprietary computer companies, whether it's Digital or Silicon Graphics (SGI ) or Apple (AAPL ), I think the fates are all relatively similar. We know how the movie ends. It's just a question of what happens in the middle. Apple has a very little customer base. If you look at the economics, it has been extremely hard for Apple to get a return on its R&D with a shrinking volume base. It's not to say that Apple's products aren't innovative or cool, but the economic factors here are so overwhelming, it's very hard for them to swim against that tide.

Q: If you were running Apple, is there anything you could do to change that?
A: I would never take that job.

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/01_16 /b3728067.htm

Re:Time to Short Apple's Stock

[kesuki]

Sony _could_ have revived the 'walkman' name with a stylish portable mp3 player.. remember when everyone had to have a walkman? but sony was at odds with itself over DRM etc etc.. the last thing they wanted to be making and selling was a product that could be used to illegally trade mp3's. so, there were a lot of people trying to make a name in the portable mp3 market, and that's when apple hit with the ipod. and the ipod it was good, and people loved it, and the ipod became the 'walkman' of this generation. 'oh you're not cool, that's just some crappy mp3 player, too poor to get an ipod huh?'

The cat is already out of the bag, and yeah, sony was well aware of mp3 players, and had the hardware and engineering guys who could have designed an efficient one. they were banking on the mp3 format to 'just go away' so their record label could make more money selling CDs. or something like that.

Besides sony was focusing it's effort at dominating the video game sector, they've done an awesome job at it, and they've managed to 'launch' the psp (against nintendo's iron grip on the handheld market) in every major country except the UK. And all this for a system that won't have a respectable* game title for another year, and has no back catalog of compatable games.

I know people who are very happy with their PSPs but most of them have hacked the firmware and are playing ROMs on emulators... frankly I'd rather buy a flash linker and play them on a cheap GBA SP, since DS linkers are still immature, and GBA linkers work with more systems than DS ones. http://www.gameboy-advance.net/nintendo_ds/neo-fla sh/neoflash-review.htm

for $300(or less) i can get a very nice car/portable dvd player with detachable screen(s). and i don't need to buy movies that only play on a psp, plus i can play dvd+-r's i've burned, or movies i've rented from netflix. so the movie playback capabilites don't impress me.

the NDS however has several games i love, and several i wouldn't mind owning.. plus works with my old gba titles, which i have about 20 of or so. I am still worried about nintendo's long term strategy, but they've beaten everyone else out of the portable market, so if they keep on making awesome systems with awesome games, then sony will remain the 'other' portable gaming device.

*= IMNSHO psps launch titles suck, a look at gamefaqs doesn't show much promise til you look at games with no us release dates, or release dates a year or more from now.