The first day of trading for 2022 was the day. While a piece from TechCrunch says there’s a bit of quibbling, just about every financial and tech site seems to agree that Monday 3 January 2022 was the day that Apple became the first publicly traded company with a market value of $3 trillion.
The quibbling, by the way, is between some who say Apple crested $3T while others say shares stalled at $2.99T. Doesn’t sound like a lot until one remembers (as TechCrunch pointed out) that the difference between those two amounts is $10 billion.
Assuming the $3T number, TechCrunch puts it in context. Less than five-years ago (May 2017), CrunchBase pointed out that Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft together were approaching a combined market cap of $3T. Now, Apple’s there by itself. CNET goes a bit more global in its contextualization, saying:
At $3 trillion, Apple's value is greater than the annual economic output of the United Kingdom, France, India or Italy, according to data collected by the World Bank. Only Germany, Japan, China and the US are larger.
What changed? Probably more things than we can count, though the TechCrunch piece gives a lot of credit to COVID-19. “The pandemic revalued tech companies,” according to the report, “giving them far more value per dollar of revenue than before.”
And?
Mike Wuerthele at Apple Insider had an interesting editorial on the milestone. That came under the headline, “Apple's $3 trillion valuation is the least interesting news about the company.”
If you’ll pardon my two-cents… eh. I mean, he’s not wrong when he says news of the $3 trillion in valuation “is far less important and notable than what the company has in mind for the future — and how it gets it done.” At the same time, the $3T is indicative of sentiment around Apple. It’s indicative of investor belief in “what the company has in mind for the future,” which theoretically helps fund “how it gets it done.” Still, props to him for his Jed Bartlet-esque, “What’s next?”
What’s next, by the way, are VR, AR, and Apple Car, in his estimation. The way Wuerthele sees it, “the $3 trillion valuation has no impact on what [Apple] plans on doing, or on the road map that it set years ago.”
And now, the punchline: Apple’s current market valuation is not $3T - no quibbling about it.
