“Apple Inc., already the world’s largest company by market capitalization, [yesterday] hit a record intraday value: $700 billion,” Tim Higgins, Joseph Ciolli and Callie Bost report for Bloomberg. “Shares of Apple rose to as much as $119.75 at the start of trading in New York [yesterday], giving the company a valuation of more than $702 billion, a milestone that no other U.S. company has ever reached. The stock ended up falling less than 1 percent to $117.60 at the close in New York, putting its market capitalization at $690 billion. That still gave the iPhone maker about 1.7 times the value of the world’s second-biggest company, Exxon Mobil Corp. Exxon, which has lost about $43 billion during the five-month oil rout, has a capitalization of $401 billion.”
“Apple is up 47 percent this year, heading for its sixth straight annual gain. That would be its longest streak ever, topping a five-year rally from 2003 to 2007,” Higgins, Ciolli and Bost report. “Its market capitalization reached as high as $658 billion in September 2012, before a 44 percent plunge in the stock price over the next seven months.”
“Apple’s market cap has exceeded that of Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) since May 2010. Microsoft now has a market capitalization of $391 billion,” Higgins, Ciolli and Bost report. “Apple’s value also moved above that of Google Inc. in January 2010. The operator of the world’s most popular search engine currently has a market cap of $370 billion.”
Read more in the full article here.
I think you still need to adjust for inflation to surpass Microsoft’s market cap (just to make it official, of course). To do so, I believe Apple will need to get to around $800 billion.
If they can take inflation into consideration then how come they don’t take Microsoft’s lofty P/E at the time into consideration? One could say, “Let’s set Microsoft’s P/E at 20 and see what the market cap would have amounted to.
If Apple’s P/E were in the 70 range now, could you imagine what the market cap would be.
You have to consider also that Microsoft came to that capitalization with almost no competitor arround, with out investing in research(stealing and copying is not research), with apple almost broke, and all that happened during the boom of the technological era.
For Apple to achieve this capitalization in these times is a lot bigger than what Microsoft achieved in that era.
I’m not saying that’s definitive, rather its a nit some of the talking heads have claimed. Apple is in a class all by itself IMO.
$700 billion is the number of doom. It’s the peak of Apple’s parabolic trajectory. The pundits will be out in droves claiming that like the speed of light a certain number cannot be exceeded and how Apple’s stellar growth has gone too far, too fast and the end is approaching that much sooner. Anything to scare off new investors.
/s
Bwahahaha! The manipulatory BS has become so standard, we’re creating standup comedy routines to satirize it! More please.
The growth looks more logarithmic than parabolic to me, as it does to Asymco’s Horace Dediu, the only analyst whose mathematical opinion is worth more than the wodge of snot spouted by the rest.
I’ve posted this before, but I still think it’s worth reposting this article on the history of huge market caps. I wonder if all the previous companies felt as stable to their investors as Apple does to me. Apple is making money hand over fist! http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2012/08/22/a-history-of-ridiculously-big-companies.aspx
Here’s my investment perspective. I still can’t just drive to a store that advertises Apple products, phone store or retailer, and expect to buy an iPhone 6 or 6 Plus and take possession that day. The things have been on sale for three months and you still can’t just go buy one. You might get lucky and arrive close to a shipment, but your odds are slim. You cannot expect me to believe that’s all existing Apple cultists. All of that will feed the App Store/iTunes behemoth. That doesn’t even take into consideration that if you call a tablet a PC, Apple far and away sells the most PCs on the planet.
Buy.
“Apple is up 47 percent this year, heading for its sixth straight annual gain.”
Umm, really? Did I miss something last year?
Apparently. Here are the ending share prices for last five years:
2014 (not yet over): $118
2013: $80
2012: $75
2011: $60
2010: $48
2009: $30
2008: $12
Believe it or not, I’ve been long AAPL since 2005. I really thought that the drought that we had, the drop in share price during the last half of 2012 and the first half of 2013, had left us with a decline in price from one year to the next. Thanks for setting me straight.
you’re hitting on all cylinders, gotta say
by the way, I like that feeling, when the red lights are flashing, one below the other, right before the bottom green one and the foot is dangling in tense anticipation, right before slamming to the floor to go 1/4 mile open to the universe,
man, drag is NOT a drag in those pre-drag moments !-)