The entrance to Apple Jobs Steve Jobs Theater, named after the late co-founder and CEO of the company.
James Martin / CNET
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Just two years ago, Wall Street investors drove Apple to a trillion-dollar market capitalization, making it the most valuable tech company in the world. Well, even in the face of the coronavirus pandemic, the market says Apple’s worth twice as much.
At around 7:53 PT on Wednesday, August 19, Apple’s share hit $ 467.55 a share, which, when multiplied by the nearly 4.3 million shares outstanding, Apple is priced at $ 2 trillion, a few dollars gives or takes. The move came before the company’s planned share split on August 24, which would multiply the number of shares by four and divide the value of each share by four. Apple said it started the stock split to make it easier for more people to buy shares in the company.
The milestone is for the most part symbolic. Yet it marks Apple’s unlikely rise from near bankruptcy in 1997 to titanic of the industry today. Apple’s success has been largely attributed to the leadership of people like Steve Jobs, the company’s late co-founder and CEO, former design chief Jony Ive and current CEO Tim Cook.
A look at Apple’s share a few minutes after it hit $ 2 trillion in value.
Google Finance, oddly enough
Under Jobs, Apple released well-regarded products such as the Macintosh computer in 1984, the iMac in 1997, the iPod in 2001, the iPhone in 2007 and the iPad in 2010. Ive and Cook worked with Jobs on his other computer company, NeXT, was acquired by Apple in 1996.
At $ 2 trillion, Apple’s value exceeds the economies of all just eight countries, according to data collected by the World Bank.
Apple follows Saudi Aramco, a multinational oil and gas company based in Saudi Arabia, in reaching the milestone. Saudi Aramco reached $ 2 trillion on its second day of trading on the Saudi stock exchange in December after holding the largest IPO in history, raising $ 25.6 billion in share sales.
“Financial returns are simply the result of Apple’s innovation, putting our products and customers first, and always staying true to our values,” said Apple CEO Tim Cook in a memo to staff after the company reaches $ 1 trillion, according to Reuters. Cook has often said that investors are looking to Apple to focus on performance performance instead of its products should not invest in the company.
The historic moment also comes before Apple is expected to release its highly anticipated 5G iPhone, support next-generation mobile wireless data speeds potentially 10 times faster than the rate that phones can download today. That means, for example, that people can download an entire season of a TV show in seconds.
Analysts say they expect the new capabilities of the upcoming device will trigger a “supercycle” of sales, with large swaths of iPhone owners and new converters buying the device.
“From a demand perspective, we estimate that ~ 350 million of Apple’s 950 million iPhones worldwide are in this upgrade window,” Wedbush Securities analysts wrote in a June memo to investors. “Apple remains our favorite 5G game.”
