“These days, it’s hard to find a superlative that adequately describes Apple. But maybe simplest is best: biggest,” James B. Stewart reports for The New York Times.
“Measured by market capitalization, Apple is the world’s biggest company. This week it solidified its lead over Exxon Mobil, the previous titleholder, as Apple’s shares hit an all-time high of $526.29, which gave it a market capitalization of just under $500 billion,” Stewart reports. “Apple becomes only the 11th company to reach the top spot since 1926, according Howard Silverblatt, a senior index analyst for Standard & Poor’s.”
“Apple is so big, it’s running up against the law of large numbers,” Stewart reports. “Also known as the golden theorem, with a proof attributed to the 17th century Swiss mathematician Jacob Bernoulli, the law states that a variable will revert to a mean over a large sample of results. In the case of the largest companies, it suggests that high earnings growth and a rapid rise in share price will slow as those companies grow ever larger.”
Stewart reports, “If Apple’s share price grows even 20 percent a year for the next decade, which is far below its current blistering pace, its $500 billion market capitalization would be more than $3 trillion by 2022. That is bigger than the 2011 gross domestic product of France, Brazil and all but four countries.”
Much more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: The only number that matters is Apple’s headroom (TAM) and there is plenty of that. How many people are still suffering with Windows PCs and do not own Macs? How many people do not own iPads? Or iPhones? Or Apple TVs? Or possible Apple televisions? Or, yes, even iPods? Billions. In fact, there must be over a billion people that have the means to buy an Apple product that do not have one yet. Until Apple saturates all of its markets and/or stops opening new markets, the only limit is the sky.