Apple: worth $1trn and counting
It’s surely the most remarkable turnaround in corporate history, said Robert Miller in The Times. Two decades after narrowly avoiding bankruptcy, Apple has officially become America’s first trillion-dollar business. Its 13-figure stock market valuation is higher than the GDP of all but 16 countries. Last year alone, the company racked up some $48.5bn in net profits. Its cash reserves – most of which, controversially, are stashed in offshore tax havens – total a staggering $285bn. Anyone lucky enough to have bought shares when the firm went public in 1980 will have seen their investment rise by an “eye-watering” 50,000%.
“Few companies change the world, and fewer still do it more than once,” said Alex Hern in The Guardian. Since its launch in Steve Jobs’s garage 42 years ago, Apple has repeatedly “upended industries” and “reshaped society”. The company’s first hit product, the Apple II, brought home computing into the mainstream during the 1970s and 1980s. The ipod, launched in 2001, became so popular that in 2005 the Met Police blamed the portable media player for a “26% rise in street robberies”. In 2007 came the iphone – the now-ubiquitous device that kick-started the smartphone revolution, and that still accounts for 60% of Apple’s annual revenue. Many feared that Apple would lose its mojo after Jobs’s death in 2011, said Therese Poletti and Jeremy C. Owens on Marketwatch.com. Certainly, Tim Cook, his successor as CEO, hasn’t unveiled anything as revolutionary as the ipod or the iphone. But by focusing on the firm’s lucrative “services business” – things like Apple Pay and the App Store – Cook has cannily consolidated the Apple “ecosystem”. Rather than “hitting a wall”, the company has gone from strength to strength.
Of course, $1tn is “just a number”, said Matthew Lynn in The Daily Telegraph. “With inflation and a bull market, someone was always going to get there eventually.” What’s interesting is who Apple pipped to the post: Amazon (some $120bn behind); Google’s parent company, Alphabet ($150bn); and Microsoft ($180bn). Notice a theme? Tech companies are “pulling away from the rest of the world” – and that gap is only going to widen further. These firms already have “near monopolies”, and the increasing globalisation of the stock market is also enabling more and more people – everyone from bankers in San Francisco to pension funds in Swansea – to invest in them. Unless there is a massive sea change, these tech behemoths will “dominate the global economy for decades”.