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Apple Becomes First US Company To Top $800 Billion Value (bloomberg.com)
According to Bloomberg, "Apple became the first U.S. company with a market value of more than $800 billion as investors bet the next iPhone will spur a resurgence in sales." From the report: The stock rose 1 percent Tuesday to close at $153.99 in New York, giving it a market capitalization of about $803 billion. The shares have gained 33 percent since the start of the year, helped by a buyback program that Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook extended to total $210 billion last week, from $175 billion last year. Apple's rise to the top of the world's largest equity market highlights the emergence of mobile technology and the relative decline of the oil industry in recent years. Exxon Mobil Corp.'s value peaked in the fall of 2007, when oil prices climbed toward $100 a barrel. In November of that year, PetroChina Co. briefly became the first global company with a market capitalization of more than $1 trillion. Apple's revenue grew in the most recent fiscal quarter even as iPhone unit sales fell.
Building web servers, compute engines, and datacenter servers to run VMs, are all commodity businesses with lots of competition and low margins. They are so profitable precisely because they don't waste their resources on things like that.
While very impressive numbers, when you adjust for inflation things look different.
Adjusted for inflation:
- Cisco had a market cap of 758 billion in March 2000.
- GE has a market cap of 816 billion in August 2000
- Microsoft had a market cap of 871 billion in December 1999
- IBM had a market cap of 1.3 trillion in 1967
https://qz.com/335147/apples-m... http://gadgets.ndtv.com/others...
But they all dwarf compared to the Dutch East-India Company (VOC), 1602-1800, the first publicly traded company in the world, which had a market cap of over SEVEN TRILLION inflation-adjusted dollars at its peak.