Apple Worth More Than Poland
Apple’s stock market value topped $500 billion dollars in Wednesday trading adding some gravy to world’s most valuable company. Being worth more than half a trillion dollars is a very exclusive club, in fact it has only been done five times EVER. To date only Apple, Microsoft, ExxonMobil, Cisco and General Electric have ever built up a value like that.
Exxon hasn’t been above that mark since 2007 when soaring gas prices aided the company to become the most valuable on the planet. Microsoft, Cisco and GE reached half a trillion dollars in 1999 at the pinnacle of the tech bubble. To date Microsoft is the only company to be worth more than $600 billion dollars, but as of now is worth little more than $250 billion.
Apple’s worth has now grown bigger than the gross domestic product of Poland, Belgium, Sweden, Saudi Arabia, or Taiwan.
Despite its size, Apple is still one of the fastest growing technology companies. The company reported in January that its sales grew 73% last year. The stock is worth more than $500 per share at this point hitting an all time high of $547.00 per share. What is even crazier is it was just last month that Apple broke the $400 billion dollar mark. then on January 25th is surpassed ExxonMobil to become the world’s most valuable company. PetroChina is third at $281 billion, followed by Microsoft.
What makes all of this even more unbelievable is that Apples revenues have been climbing faster than their stock worth so the stock is still relatively cheap! The tech giant’s stock trades at less than 13 times its expected earnings for 2012. That makes it cheaper than the tech-heavy Nasdaq 100, which trades at about 18 times forecast earnings.
Apple is also still much cheaper than the other hypervaluable tech stocks that do not have the reliable future of Apple such as Netflix, Zynga, LinkedIn and the soon-to-be public Facebook.
Do you find it odd that even being the most valuable company in the world, Apple is still portrayed as an underdog company?
