Apple Becomes The First Trillion Dollar Company

Hey Steemians

I'm a bit of an Apple fan myself, yes I have a Mac, an iPhone, AirPods and all the other accessories you need to live in a iOS/OSX world and today I see they've hit one of the biggest milestones ever in the companies history. While the cryptocurrency market continues to bleed out and limp along in this bear market we've seen a few things happen.

• Investors with week hands flooding the market with liquidity to get out
• Blockchain projects have gone belly up
• A steady decline in the amount of ICO's popping up
• I decline in cryptocurrency content across the internet (Steemit included) I've personally never seen so few crypto posts on the platform as compared to other posts.

So while all this is happening traditional companies soldier on and today Apple has become the world's first $1 trillion company.

Compared to cryptocurrency

To put that into perspective for you the current market cap for Bitcoin is 126 Billion while Ethereum sits at 41 billion. So you're telling me that Apple is close to 10x Bitcoins worth and over 20 times Ethereums? 1 single centralised company having that much value is absolutely insane.

So how did it get here? Why is it the first one? Could we see more trillion dollar companies? and which other firms could soon be worth as much?

Photo: Verge

Apples rise to the top

The iPhone maker's market value reached the figure in New York on Thursday and its shares closed at a new record high of $207.39. The stock had already been rising since Tuesday when it reported better than expected results for the three months to June.

Apple beat our fierce competition from Silicon Valley rivals such as Amazon and Microsoft to become the first to hit the US$1 trillion valuation. A mind-boggling figure if you ask me

Apple has been through the best of time and the worst of times and I won't go into all its history in this post but once Jobs came back to steady the sinking ship it went from strength to strength. Since the iPhone first went on sale in 2007, Apple shares have soared by 1,100% and have jumped almost a third in the past year.

The rise is even more astonishing - 50,000% - since the company first listed in 1980. That dwarfs the 2,000% increase for the S&P 500 index over the same period.

Jobs passing

Mr Jobs, who died in 2011 and was succeeded as chief executive by Tim Cook, oversaw the development of the iPhone, which transformed Apple's fortunes. Many thought this could be the end of Apples rise seeing that they lost their charismatic leader who was so tightly affiliated with the brand. However, his legacy continues to thrive under Cook's management and In 2006 the company had sales of less than $20bn and posted profits of almost $2bn.

Last year its sales hit $229bn, with profits of $48.4bn, making it the most profitable listed US company.

Apple not actually the first frist but a real first

PetroChina was briefly worth about $1.1 trillion after floating in Shanghai in 2007, although most of its shares were held by the Chinese government. It is now worth about $220bn.

Despite its $1 trillion price tag, many analysts still do not view Apple's shares as expensive given that they trade at about 15 times expected profits, compared with a figure of 82 for Amazon and 25 times for Microsoft, which leaves plenty of room for growth as its shares will be a hot commodity with this latest news. Also boosting Apple shares in recent months was the company's decision to set aside $100bn to buy back stock.

A new cook in the kitchen taking over the Job

It may have been the vision of Steve Jobs that hurtled Apple towards this milestone, but it was the business acumen of Tim Cook that tipped them over. While other tech stocks have struggled, Apple has soared ahead. So how did Cook take Apple to the next level? Well, the surge in its shares has been driven by two key factors.

It is selling fewer iPhones, but by releasing a more expensive version last year, it is making more money per device. Apple has also diversified the sources of its profits. It now makes about $10bn every three months from services such as selling apps, cloud storage and music streaming.

The firm told investors this week that it expected a very strong end to the year helped, naturally, by the release of yet another new iPhone.

Having this kind of mass appeal will always create polarised opinions but no matter what your view of the company and its products, Apple devices have changed the world - and today made financial history as well.

Have your say

What do you think of Apple being the first to break the trillion dollar mark? Pretty impressive for a company that's only 42 years old don't you think? Especially considering the fact that it started in a garage by the 2 Steve's in a rags to riches story that has captivated the world. If you haven't seen it I urge you to check out a few of the documentaries or biographical movies on the topic.

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Source: BBC