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Apple Passes $300B Market Cap, 2nd In the World
An anonymous reader writes "In May, Apple surpassed Microsoft in market capitalization to become the second largest company (by that measure) in the world. Today, with its shares riding high, Apple passed $300 billion in market cap, entering a club of two along with the still-gigantic ExxonMobile. And investors' targets could bring Apple beyond where Exxon is now (though Exxon continues to soar as well). Perhaps Wall Street is catching on that, despite the discontinuation of their underused Xserve, Apple is in fact becoming one of the key tech providers to enterprise, a position that even a year ago seemed laughable. If you consider the iPad to be a PC (which enterprise increasingly is), then suddenly you realize that Apple is expected to climb to 12% market share in 2011. Plus, of course, they have those little things called iPods, and iTunes..."
Buying stock in a company that doesn't pay dividends is just gambling - you're buying in the hope that you can find a chump who'll pay more to buy it off you at some point in the future. You can only make money by selling the stock. Apple isn't unique in this regard: most major tech companies and oil drilling companies don't pay dividends. But to me it just looks like a house of cards. You're just gambling on investor confidence in a company.
Apple will never replace Microsoft in the workplace, because they don't want to, there's not nearly as much money in it as replacing Microsoft in the home.
Yeah.. but from the summary:
Perhaps Wall Street is catching on that, despite the discontinuation of their underused Xserve, Apple is in fact becoming one of the key tech providers to enterprise, a position that even a year ago seemed laughable.
That made me actually read the article and it does not really indicate that Apple has anything earth shattering for enterprise at all. I have not really heard anything either, hence the quietly I guess. All it talks about is how enterprise is "figuring out" how to integrate the iPad. I hardly see that as providing key technology to enterprise which is exactly what the summary and article claims.
At least in 2009 (I haven't looked up 2010)
The Blackberry phones outsold iPhones (revenue and units sold) and as usual, Nokia dwarfs them all (in market share).
Granted Apple has done quite well in the MP3 player market, and with its excellent profit margin it is certainly an extremely successful company. But let's compare Apple (market cap $296 billion) to Exxon Mobil (market cap $377 billion).
Exxon Mobil's 2010 profits of $19 Billion on $285 Billion in revenue completely dwarf Apple's 2010 profit of $6 billion on $36 billion in revenue. Granted Apple has a higher profit margin than Exxon Mobil, but in 2009 Exxon Mobil's profits were greater than Apple's revenue.
Both companies are certainly successful, but I suspect Apple's stock price has more to do with its image than its value.
21.75 isn't low. The tech industry typically has unreasonably high valuations due to the tendency of the industry to capture the imagination of know nothing investors.
Right now, MSFT is trading at an 11.86 P/E ration and Google at a 24.21, but MSFT despite all the ill will I personally have against them, has done a better job over time maintaining its income and I don't expect that to change any time soon.
You'd have to be an idiot to think that APPL is genuinely worth about double what MSFT is.
If you mull it over, you'll realize that consumers actually require a HIGHER level of security than do enterprises. Enterprises can afford to be a little lax because they have full-time people dealing with security issues that arise, and maintain boxes.
Consumers have noen of that; they have only themselves. Would not the blood of any corporate IT manage run cold at the thought of a system that had to be maintained by a user, for years on end? But that is exactly what happens with hundreds of millions of consumers. Computing devices aimed at them must be FAR more solid and robust than any product targeting an enterprise, if they are to work well for any length of time.
Furthermore employees are a lot easier on equipment than a home user, a home user moves stuff around and takes it with them. Office equipment generally vegetates in one location, and is handled with more care.
And that is why the enterprise is starting to adopt Apple gear, because Apple has had to build software and hardware secure and robust enough for real world use, not coddled managed enterprise land. In the end business people want solutions to work and it simply cannot be overlooked anymore that Apple gear is providing real solutions that work for everyone.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
A friend asked me to help get their new Christmas MacBook Pro to print photos with a 8-yr-old Canon printer. First, I go to the Canon website looking for drivers. Canon doesn't have them for download for that model anymore, though, not even for Windows. Googling finds the 'download-driver' websites offering drivers...but they are for older OS versions and won't download without the obligatory 'signing up' etc. Frustrated, I plug the printer usb cable into the macbook and expect to see a pop-up screen about finding new hardware and where should it look for a new driver but...nothing. Click through to 'printers' and...it says the printer is not only recognized but ready to print. Yeah, sure. Click on the iPhoto app and select 4x6 borderless print and...in a few seconds out pops a beautiful print. I'd been so conditioned by the Windows way of doing things that I expected it not to work with OS X 10.5. What does this have to do with the TFA? Only that Apple has got it going on right now. Someone else might beat them but it won't be because Apple wasn't offering good products...the someone else will have to be offering much better products and that is going to be very, very difficult to do.
If Apple one day decides to take that it now has the resources, it can and it will and the Microsoft of today stands no chance of stopping it.
What about Office, Visual Studio, the .NET Framework (LINQ, WPF, WCF, ADO.NET, etc, etc, all designed for business), legacy applications and documents, Active Directory, the ability to run it on hardware by the lowest bidder, etc,
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All it talks about is how enterprise is "figuring out" how to integrate the iPad. I hardly see that as providing key technology to enterprise which is exactly what the summary and article claims.
iPad buying has become a frenzy. Companies are making them fit all kinds of places they don't fit well so that they can look forward-thinking by following everyone else.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"