It’s unheard of on Wall Street. Apple crossed the $ 3 trillion capitalization mark on Monday. This symbolic threshold testifies to the success of a group whose value has almost increased tenfold since the departure of the iconic Steve Jobs. Apple is above all very far ahead of the others. Microsoft is indeed the only other company in the world whose stock market value exceeds 2,000 billion dollars.
This incursion was only of short duration, the space of a few seconds a little before 2 p.m. in New York (8 p.m. in Paris), the title having lost a little ground thereafter. The action ended up 2.50% to 182.01 dollars. AAPL, the initials of the title listed on the Nasdaq electronic stock exchange, weighed on Monday closing 2.986 billion dollars.
Sixteen months to take 1,000 billion
In early August 2018, it became the first company to pass the $ 1,000 billion mark, 38 years after its IPO, Apple only needed two years to cross $ 2,000 billion, then 16 months to go beyond of 3,000 billion. Nothing seems to be able to stop the progress of its course. Yet analysts were disappointed with its last quarter, completed at the end of September and published at the end of October. The shortage of silicone, a critical component in microchip manufacturing, along with coronavirus-related disruptions at subcontracting factories in Southeast Asia, cost the group around $ 6 billion in sales.
When presenting these results, CEO Tim Cook explained that he expected the impact to be at least as significant in the following quarter, which covered the holiday season. Despite these difficulties, the firm still expected to achieve record sales during the quarter from October to December, the first of its 2021/22 fiscal year.
IPhone boosts turnover
Some 45 years after its founding, Apple is a company driven by iPhone sales. Its flagship product, launched in 2007, generated some 191.9 billion dollars in sales during its 2020/21 fiscal year (October to September), by far a record. The services business, which ranges from Apple Music to the Apple TV + streaming service and iCloud data storage, also plays a significant role. With $ 68 billion in revenue in 2020/21, this pole represents almost 20% of the group’s turnover from Cupertino in California.
This new growth engine, added to the success of the iPhone 13, launched in September and which has just finished two months in a row at the top of smartphone sales in China, should take the value of the Californian giant even further, according to Dan Ives, Wedbush Securities analyst. Even the assaults it has been subjected to in recent years from competitors or regulators, who blame it for its closed and exclusive ecosystem, do not seem to affect the popularity of the title with investors.