In a year for which the word ‘difficult’ feels like an understatement, Apple’s financial successes might not be much to cheer about; but they remain impressive. To cap this, the company has now achieved a market capitalisation of $1.5 trillion for the first time in its – or indeed any other US company’s – history.
At time of writing Apple is worth $1.529 trillion. The company’s closest rivals in this area are Microsoft and Amazon, which are currently worth $1.493 trillion and $1.32 trillion respectively.
Apple started 2020 poorly, but has gone from strength to strength ever since, launching a series of high-profile products and building hype ahead of a WWDC event that will be online-only for the first time. Apple has recorded its highest ever Nasdaq listing, and one analyst has forecast that the company will be worth $2 trillion within four years.
If we expand our scope outside the US and tech markets, one company, the oil and gas giant Saudi Aramco, has already broken the $2 trillion mark. And if we take inflation into account, a number of colonial companies founded in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were even more valuable: the Dutch East India company was worth the equivalent of around $8 trillion and had its own coins. It also started wars and profited from slavery, but that’s a discussion for another day.
Via MACWORLD