Earlier this week Apple became the only second company ever globally and the first US company to cross the $2-trillion market cap milestone after Saudi Arabia’s state-owned oil major Saudi Aramco. Founded in 1976, while it took consumer electronics multinational founded by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne, 42 years to hit $1 trillion in value in 2018, the other trillion dollars came in just two years. In fact, according to data from YCharts, Apple’s market cap stood at $981 billion on March 23, 2020. The data showed that Apple got its second $1 trillion in market cap astonishingly in just 21 weeks even as the world economy grappled with the slowdown amid the Covid pandemic.
To put Apple’s $2.13 trillion market cap in perspective, the company comparatively is now worth around two-third of India in terms of annual GDP of $3 trillion and nearly 7X of Pakistan’s $278 billion GDP. Apple is also bigger than some of the leading economies globally in terms of GDP such as Italy ($1.9 billion), Brazil ($1.8 billion), Canada ($1.7 billion), Russia ($1.6 billion), Spain ($1.39 billion), Australia ($1.37 billion), according to the 2019 figures by Statista.
In Rupees, this metaphor looks even interesting. Apple’s market cap is now Rs 149858600000000 (almost Rs 1.5 crore crores). Even in comparison to the market cap (as on August 21, 2020) of the top five Indian companies combined, Apple is way bigger. Adding up Reliance’s market cap of $182.9 billion followed by $112.5 billion market cap of TCS, $79.6 billion of HDFC Bank, $69 billion of Hindustan Unilever, and $53.9 billion of Infosys, the combined market cap is nearly $500 billion. And this is just one-fourth of Apple.
Also read: Amazon, Flipkart, others may have more fierce competitors ahead after Reliance in e-commerce, grocery
Meanwhile, Apple has been facing challenges on the regulatory front for its dominant position in the smartphone segment. According to Bloomberg, the European Union in June had announced that the company had launched two formal antitrust investigations into the company. One of these investigations is looking especially into the requirement guidelines of its in-app purchase system. Last month, Tim Cook defended Apple’s App Store policies and high fee structure during the antitrust hearing. According to Reuters, Apple accounted for nearly 7 per cent of the S&P 500’s total market value even as its market cap is around equal to the combined values of the S&P 500’s 200 smallest companies. Amazon and Microsoft with market caps of $1.65 trillion and $1.61 trillion as on August 21 were the third and fourth largest companies in the world.
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