Apple overtakes Saudi Aramco to become world's most valuable company
The day after an incredible earnings report, Apple has overtaken oil giant Saudi Aramco to become the most valuable public traded company in the world on Friday.
Credit: WikiCommons
Following the company's earnings report Thursday, Apple's stock price surged as high as 10.5% in intraday trading. Ultimately, shares of AAPL closed at $425.18 at end of trading on Friday.
Altogether, that give Apple a market capitalization of $1.84 trillion, based on share price and number of outstanding shares. That allowed Apple to close with a market valuation higher than Saudi Arabian oil juggernaut Saudi Aramco, which has held the number-one spot since it went public last year.
The Cupertino tech giant reported earnings on Thursday that smashed Wall expectations, with revenue clocking in at $59.7 billion even during the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. Apple also announced a four-for-one stock split that could make AAPL more accessible to a broader range of investors.
Following the earnings report, Apple's share price passed the $400 price-per-share milestone.
Apple is already in the top spot when it comes to U.S.-based publicly traded companies. Earlier in 2020, the company also became the first U.S. firm to pass the $1.5 trillion market valuation milestone.
Shares of Apple have proven themselves resilient, even during COVID-19. In the June quarter, Apple's iPhone segment actually grew 2% year-over-year even as smartphone sales are on the decline. Other product categories, including iPad, Mac and Services, also showed rock-solid growth.
Apple's stock price is up 84.74% since a pandemic-caused low point on March 23 that rocked the entire market. Apple recovered to pre-coronavirus levels in May, and has continued growing roughly 30% since then.
Credit: WikiCommons
Following the company's earnings report Thursday, Apple's stock price surged as high as 10.5% in intraday trading. Ultimately, shares of AAPL closed at $425.18 at end of trading on Friday.
Altogether, that give Apple a market capitalization of $1.84 trillion, based on share price and number of outstanding shares. That allowed Apple to close with a market valuation higher than Saudi Arabian oil juggernaut Saudi Aramco, which has held the number-one spot since it went public last year.
The Cupertino tech giant reported earnings on Thursday that smashed Wall expectations, with revenue clocking in at $59.7 billion even during the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. Apple also announced a four-for-one stock split that could make AAPL more accessible to a broader range of investors.
Following the earnings report, Apple's share price passed the $400 price-per-share milestone.
Apple is already in the top spot when it comes to U.S.-based publicly traded companies. Earlier in 2020, the company also became the first U.S. firm to pass the $1.5 trillion market valuation milestone.
Shares of Apple have proven themselves resilient, even during COVID-19. In the June quarter, Apple's iPhone segment actually grew 2% year-over-year even as smartphone sales are on the decline. Other product categories, including iPad, Mac and Services, also showed rock-solid growth.
Apple's stock price is up 84.74% since a pandemic-caused low point on March 23 that rocked the entire market. Apple recovered to pre-coronavirus levels in May, and has continued growing roughly 30% since then.
Comments
Those guys are magicians up there ! Unbelievable!!!
http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2048299,00.html
I've seen other comparisons to Saudi Aramco's market cap. I don't think it makes for an apt comparison. Saudi Aramco is still almost entirely owned by the government of Saudi Arabia. The vast majority of its shares aren't available for trade. I think the public float is still around 2%. A market capitalization based on that small a float isn't necessarily as a good a reflection of the company's value as one based on a substantial float. That said, Saudi Aramco has - as recently as the first quarter - been more profitable than Apple, even with an effective tax rate around 50%.
EDIT: I meant to add, since some will probably be watching for a $2 trillion market cap for Apple, that the new share price for that is $467.77.
And brain-computer interfaces will be arriving sooner than expected: https://www.inverse.com/innovation/neuralink-elon-musk-reveals-more-details-coming-soon
https://money.cnn.com/1997/08/08/technology/apple_microsoft_pkg/
Imagining the Singularity happening in 2045 is like imagining in 1968 that 2001: A Space Odyssey would actually happen in 2001 - wildly over optimistic.
In 2045 we may have desktop quantum computers with mind-blowing computational speed. But AI will depend not so much raw speed, but on the soft wiring of a great number of task specific neural networks into a single coherent entity, which no one has even begun to work on in earnest, at least as far as I can tell. A recognizable AI will also need a variety of sensory inputs similar to our five senses to establish its understanding of the physical universe.
We can do really cool and sometimes useful “parlor tricks” with the emergent properties of task specific neural networks. But we’ve got zip that can pull it all together into one coherent consciousness. The Singularity is still a ways off.
Real investors look at the S&P 500 index as a far more accurate barometer of corporate America. There's a committee that selects the constituent companies and it is market cap weighted so #1 contributes more to S&P 500 than #500.
Note that the S&P 500 has some rules of its own. One reason why Berkshire-Hathaway issued cheaper-priced Class B shares was to gain appropriate representation on the S&P 500 as well as greater adoption from fund managers, retirement pension plans, etc.
That said, I'm pretty sure Cook, Apple's BOD, CFO Maestri are all pretty aware of the impacts of the stock split since they did 7-to-1 back in 2004. They could have picked any multiple yet settled on four.
A hundred bucks doesn't buy as much today as it did twenty years ago.
I'm skeptical about the mention of Saudi Aramco which IPO-ed 1.5% of its value. With so few publicly traded shares I rather doubt that that market capitalization is a good indicator of Saudi Aramco's true value.
The singularity is scary if we are not careful. There are theories that if AI gets too smart they'll either see us as bugs or become servants of gratitude. They will eventually abandon us for technological advancement and generate super computers the size of planets.
Because an iKnockoff scumbag would rather sell his family's data than see Apple succeed.