During Tim Cook's interview at an investor's conference today in San Francisco, Goldman Sachs President and COO Gary Cohn told Cook that his company, Apple, had become the first publicly-traded company to
ever top $700 billion in market capitalization, and the stock also closed the day at a
new record high of $122.02 per share. The peaks come just a under a week after the previous all-time high
last Wednesday, following a record-shattering holiday quarter.
All the markets today closed generally about a full percentage point up, and Apple's own stock rode that alongside its plethora of recent good news to jump about two percent on Tuesday, gaining $2.30 from yesterday, and finishing with a market cap of $710.74 billion. Investors were impressed not just with the company's quarterly performance in its fiscal Q1 2015 results -- which both set records for company performance but also topped the all-time best performance of any publicly-traded company in terms of both revenue and profit in a single quarter ever -- and in the reported strong growth in China and other emerging markets, where Apple has displaced rival Samsung as the top-performing smartphone.
At the conference, Cook and analysts also focused on the strong moves the company has made in future growth opportunities, such as the Apple's initiatives in HealthKit, HomeKit, CarPlay (all three of which will open new markets for Apple), the IBM partnership for enterprise sales, Apple Pay, and its aggressive expansion in China. Cook even took time to tell investors attending the conference that Apple's strong environmental projects will pay off in cost savings for the company down the road, giving the firm a fixed (and very low) price for energy and acting as a hedge against fluctuation and inflation in power costs -- though this was not the reason the firm was investing in it so heavily.
Apple is now not only the top seller of smartphones in the US -- something it has done since 2007 -- but for the last quarter its sales of the iPhone 6 line slightly outpaced the combined sales of all other smartphones put together. The company also took the top selling spot for smartphones in China, Japan and a number of other major and emerging markets, seemingly on the strength of its finally bringing a bigger (4.7-inch) display and phablet (5.5-inch) option in the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus, respectively.
The triumph comes on the heels of CEO Tim Cook being named CEO of the year by CNN, with the long-overdue acknowledgement from the eminent business periodical that it has become "increasingly clear that Tim Cook knows what he's doing" in leading the company, and that Apple's record of innovation has not suffered under his management, given the Apple Pay initiative and the forthcoming Apple Watch, among other innovations and inventions.
The company is now seven-tenths of the way towards a possible future market cap of $1 trillion dollars, and is currently valued more than $326 billion higher than the second-most valuable US traded company, ExxonMobil (valued at $382.33 billion). Apple is now worth just about as much than the third- and fourth-most valuable firms -- Google ($365.21 billion) and Microsoft ($349.48 billion) -- put together.
Interestingly, Apple still has an intermediate goal between its present position (which took nearly 40 years to achieve) and the crown becoming a trillion-dollar company: unlocking the status the most valuable publicly-traded company of all time. Because Microsoft hit its peak valuation of $613 billion in 1999 dollars, it's adjusted record would be $874 billion today -- so to become the most valuable company in history, Apple will once again have to top Microsoft.
So far, AAPL is up 10.5 percent since the start of 2015, and 59.37 percent from a year ago today. At the conference, it was noted that Apple stock had appreciated 120 percent (not counting today's rise) since Cook took over as CEO in 2011, increased revenue by 56 percent, had raised average selling prices and revenue on its iPhone despite the abundance of lower-cost competitors, and returned more than $100 billion to shareholders.
Top