Apple crossed, Monday, January 3, the symbolic threshold of 3,000 billion dollars (approximately 2,655 billion euros) in capitalization. This is a first in stock market history, which testifies to the success of a group whose value has increased tenfold since the departure of its co-founder and CEO Steve Jobs in August 2011.
This incursion was only of short duration, the space of a few seconds a little before 8 p.m. (Paris time), the title having lost a little ground thereafter. At around 8:10 p.m., the stock was up 2.6% to $ 182.19. AAPL, the initials for the title listed on the Nasdaq Electronic Exchange, represented, at this point in time, $ 2,988 billion.
Became, at the beginning of August 2018, the first company to the $ 1,000 billion mark, thirty-eight years after its IPO, Apple only needed two years to cross 2,000 billion, then sixteen months to go beyond 3,000 billion.
Nothing seems to be able to stop the progression of the price of Apple, which has yet disappointed analysts in its last quarter, completed at the end of September and published at the end of October. Microsoft, the company co-founded by Bill Gates, is the only other company in the world to exceed $ 2 trillion on the stock market.
The shortage of silicon, a critical component in the manufacture of microchips, and disruption related to the Covid-19 pandemic at subcontracting factories in Southeast Asia have cost Apple around $ 6 billion in sales. When presenting the results, CEO Tim Cook said he expected the impact to be at least as significant in the following quarter, which covers the holiday season.
A company driven by iPhone sales
Despite these challenges, the company still expected to achieve record sales in the October-December quarter, the first of its 2021-2022 fiscal year.
Some forty-five years after its founding on the idea of the consumer microcomputer, Apple is a company driven by iPhone sales. Its flagship product, launched in 2007, generated some 191.9 billion dollars in sales during its 2020-2021 fiscal year (October to September), by far a record.
Even the assaults on it 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.
The group is, in fact, subject to a European Union (EU) procedure to have “Distorted competition” through its app store App Store, which typically charges app publishers anywhere from 15% to 30% commission.
In September, a US federal judge banned Apple from forcing publishers to use its payment system for their applications, while ruling that the iPhone maker did not have an illegal monopoly.
The group recently made some concessions, to allow publishers to bypass this payment system, under certain conditions.