“With Apple shares having recently topped $500, how soon might they hit $1,000?” Jack Hough wonders for SmartMoney.
“That is an impatient thought for an investor, perhaps. But Apple shareholders have gotten used to fast gratification: The share price has doubled five times in the past decade,” Hough explains. “A doubling of the stock price from Friday’s $522.41 would put Apple’s market value at over $900 billion. No U.S. company has ever been that large.”
Hough writes, “Such a value seems plausible, however. Microsoft reached a value of around $600 billion in late 1999, which is more than $800 billion in today’s dollars. It was helped by a tech-stock boom, but Apple today produces more than triple the profit that Microsoft did back then, not adjusted for inflation. Another important difference: Microsoft in late 1999 controlled more than 90% of the market for personal-computer operating systems, according to some estimates. Apple controlled 26.6% of the mobile-computing market in the fourth quarter of 2011, including notebooks and tablets, according to NPD DisplaySearch, which provides research for the display industry. Its smartphone market share was 23.9% in the fourth quarter, according to Strategy Analytics, a technology consultant. ‘Apple has plenty of room to gain market share in the U.S., and even more in emerging markets like China,” says Michael Walkley, who covers Apple for Toronto investment bank Canaccord Genuity.'”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: As we just wrote on Friday: “[What] 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.”
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Joe Architect” for the heads up.]