“In the race to a trillion, Apple is closer than ever,” Lucinda Shen reports for Fortune. “Buoyed by strong earnings and optimism surrounding the iPhone X, the market value of the tech giant has closed above $900 billion for the first time: $904 billion as of Wednesday.”
“Apple would not be the first publicly traded company to reach a trillion dollars in market value. That distinction belongs to oil and gas producer PetroChina, which briefly topped $1 trillion on the Shanghai Stock Exchange in 2007,” Shen reports. “Apple also would not be the most valuable company in the world. Most experts believe that distinction belongs to state-owned oil giant Aramco, which the Saudis believe could make a $2 trillion IPO.”
“However, the iPhone maker is the biggest public company in the world,” Shen reports. “As investors look forward to how sales of the iPhone X fare (figures that won’t show up until 2018), it is a mere 11% push away from the much discussed $1 trillion valuation.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Briefly on an iPO surge is one thing; earning and maintaining it will be quite another.
There will be no ARAMCO IPO because the Suadi princes cannot tolerate the public disclosures necessary to be a publicly traded company, except on maybe the Venezuelan exchange.
The IPO is the princes’ idea… more specifically, the idea of the Crown Prince who is almost the only one who matters in the Kingdom at present. The massive corruption arrests this last week were to show that he wants Saudi to join the rest of the world. The IPO will be an even clearer sign of that, besides generating the cash he needs to diversify the local economy against the exhaustion of the petroleum reserves.
These are the lengths they go to downplay Apple’s success.
I think it was CNBC or MSNBC had some genius jackass who said Apple is now a “screaming sell” because there was no way Apple could maintain momentum this year. It was the case of Apple moving up too far and too fast and needed a pullback. Apple isn’t in the class of Amazon or Alphabet in terms of growth. If Amazon went up 100% in a year it would still be considered undervalued whereas Apple shares are said to be extremely overbought. I think the financial genius said Apple has nothing beyond the next iPhone.
I’m certain every quarter Apple does well on earnings, CNBC will trot out some talking-head jackass to say Apple has completely run out of steam and it’s time to sell. What burns me is that if the corporate tax reform goes through, Apple will be sitting on a heck of a lot of cash to play with. If that cash isn’t worth something then I really don’t know what Apple has to do to get respect.
I’m really puzzled about when Apple does really well on earnings it’s still being seen on the verge of a major collapse. It’s as though success breeds failure for Apple. It appears Wall Street can accept both Amazon and Alphabet being $1T market cap companies, but not Apple. That’s just so weird. How often do $1T market cap companies come into existence? Is it really that easy for companies to pile on hundreds of billions of dollars.
Apple’s Services is the segments that really jumps out at you, 34% YOY growth and a Q4 figure of $8.5 Billion. Services growth is now unstoppable, I predict services revenue will catch up iPhone revenue within 5 years, it’s already overtaken Mac revenue, that’s seriously impressive. Customers are now locked into the App ecosystem and synergistically locked into Apple hardware. It’s a self fulfilling prophecy of growth on growth. Forget $1 Trillion, by 2022 Apple will be worth $2 Trillion, no doubt in my mind.
PetroChina does not really qualify in this race as it is a quasi-government owned entity with much of its capitalization backed by a socialist/communist economy.
If you go that route, you could be tossing in many other quasi-government-private partnerships as well. Market Cap is for public company valuation, not some fictitious estimate that incorporates the values propped up by government ownership.