>
At $3,040,000,000,000, Apple is worth almost as much as Britain’s GDP, which is over three trillion!
- Shares of the tech giant reached an all-time high of $193 in Wall Street trading yesterday
Apple’s value has once again passed the $3 trillion (£2.3 trillion) mark, cementing its position as the world’s richest company.
Shares of the tech giant hit a record high of $193 in Wall Street trading yesterday as it continued an upward march that has seen its share price rise 54 percent year-to-date.
It means it’s now worth $3.04 trillion, more than the combined value of Google parent company Alphabet and Amazon, which are valued at $1.5 trillion and $1.3 trillion, respectively.
The iPhone maker was the first company in the world to reach $1 trillion in value in 2018, and two years later became the first to reach $2 trillion in value.
In fact, the milestone figure puts Apple’s valuation just below the UK’s GDP ($3.07 million).
Shares of the tech giant reached a record high of $193 in Wall Street trading yesterday as it continued an upward march that has seen its share price rise 54 percent year-to-date
But Apple is far from the most valuable company in history, with the record currently held by the Dutch East India Company, which reached a valuation of about $9 trillion at today’s prices in the 1630s.
It was founded as a private trading company with a 20-year monopoly on the spice trade around modern-day Indonesia, and employs approximately 70,000 people around the world.
Widely regarded as the world’s first multinational corporation, the trading company was also the first company to offer stock to the public.
But this did not come without a cost: the Dutch East India Company transported about 50,000 slaves to colonies to support its mammoth operation.
Apple briefly crossed the $3 trillion mark last year until the Russian invasion of Ukraine sent global stock markets crashing and the company struggled with lower sales after a Covid-19 outbreak shut down one of its main factories in China.
But it rallied strongly this year, aided by large buybacks, a process by which a company buys its own shares to reduce the total, driving up the price of the remaining shares.
The company made headlines last month when it unveiled its virtual reality headset, known as the Vision Pro, which has a price tag of $3,499 (£2,850).
“We think Apple’s real-world valuation could be in the $3.5 trillion range, with a case for a $4 trillion valuation by 2025,” said Dan Ives, chief executive officer of US research firm Wedbush Securities.