How does 2 trillion dollars sound? Well when Apple became the first company to hit the 1 trillion-dollar market cap mark back in August 2018, many didn’t know it would be just two years later till they added another trillion to that capitalisation. Well Apple became the first company ever to become a $2tr company. Apple investors own about 4.3 billion shares valued at $467.77 per share.
Once Apple hit the trillion-dollar mark in 2018, it didn’t take long for Google, Microsoft and Amazon to also hit the mark with Facebook closely behind.
The four companies with the trillion-dollar valuation now represent about 20% of the S&P 500’s value which measures the stock index of 500 of the biggest American companies.
Apple besides the success of the iPhone has had many other success stories especially in it services. Even when the sale of iPhones began to slow some years ago, Apple began to launch a flurry of services like Apple Pay, Apple Music and TV, its own credit card, iCloud and enhancing the App Store among others and since then its stock price has been on the increase. The iPhone has spread well beyond Apple’s primary markets to many parts of Africa and Asia where it is now enjoying some level of patronage never seen before. It is not uncommon to see latest iPhone models like the 11 Pro Max on the streets of Lagos and Abuja even though the currency exchange rate makes it more difficult for any to buy it. A $1,000 phone that used cost about 370,000 Naira last year now goes for about 470,000 Nigerian Naira due to currency devaluation.
Apple is now so big that you now have to literally compare them to the GDPs of industrialised nations in Europe. Take a look at the World Bank chart below;
Apple’s market cap is now the size of Italy and $800m shy that of the United Kingdom. This means that it is now bigger than the GDPs of Canada and Brazil which come in at $1.7tr and $1.8tr respectively. There is no African nation comes close. So, for example the GDP of Nigeria at $390b and that of South Africa at $380b which are two of sub-Saharan biggest economies combined does not even come close to Apple’s market cap. The West African region has a combined GDP of $1.3tr and when you stretch this across the continent, the GDP figure for Africa comes in at $2.3tr. Take a look at the World Bank figures leading up to 2019 below.
[xyz-ihs snippet=”africa-gdp-wb”]
Bottom line is that Apple is really big. Apple was founded by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne in April 1976. It is a Cupertino in California based company with Tim Cook as its CEO. It is worthy of note that since he took over in 2011, the market value of Apple has increased from $348 billion to what it is today.
