Next record: Apple reaches market value of three trillion dollars

Apple’s record hunt on Wall Street continues: As the first company in the world, the iPhone giant reached a market value of three trillion dollars on Monday.

The milestone is the result of a year-long rally that was still picking up speed in the Corona crisis. Even global chip bottlenecks, problems in the supply chains and pandemic-related production downtimes could not change that.

At the beginning of the week, Apple reached a price increase of around three percent to $ 182.88 to break the world record. For comparison: At three trillion dollars, the Group’s market capitalization is now higher than the annual economic output of large economies such as Great Britain or France.

However, the share was unable to hold its course. At the end of trading, the market capitalization was again just under three trillion dollars. Apple passed the $ 2 trillion mark in August 2020. Two years earlier, the company had made history as the first US corporation with a 13-digit rating.

The cheap money fuels stock prices

Other corporations later made it into this club. The software giant Microsoft – which had even overtaken Apple in the meantime in the meantime – as well as the Google parent Alphabet, the world’s largest online retailer Amazon and the rapidly growing electric car manufacturer Tesla were able to come up with trillion-dollar reviews on the US stock exchanges. Apple is currently clearly at the top.

Driven by a flood of cheap money from the central banks, the financial markets have generally tended to airy exchange rates in recent years. But unlike highly traded start-ups, Apple is continuously making billions in profits thanks to the great demand for iPhones and other tech products. Although the last quarter suffered from a shortage of chips and global supply chain problems, Apple earned $ 94.7 billion in the fiscal year ended September, an increase of around 65 percent year-on-year.

Calculated over the entire fiscal year, Apple made an average of a billion dollars a day in sales for the first time. With sales totaling $ 365.8 billion, the group achieved growth of 33 percent. The numbers are well received on Wall Street: Last year Apple’s shares rose by almost 34 percent. This made the stocks the eighth-best value in the leading Dow Jones index.

The long-term success of the share, which has been listed on the stock exchange since 1980, shows a look at its long-term development: In the past five years, shareholders who have held the shares since then have increased their investment more than sixfold. Since the beginning of 2002, the share price has even increased by around 43,000 percent. The increase since the IPO has been even more pronounced. Anyone who started with $ 1,000 at the time and didn’t sell them now has Apple shares for more than $ 1.8 million in their depot.

For Apple CEO Tim Cook, the stock market records are also a personal success. After the death of his predecessor Steve Jobs, many observers predicted Apple’s gradual decline. Every time the iPhone sales did not go as smoothly as hoped on the stock exchange, analysts complained that the company was missing “the next big thing”. But Cook managed to tie the customers to Apple – and to expand the business with new products such as the Apple Watch computer clock or the Airpods earphones as well as various subscription services.