Apple’s $700 BEEELLION market cap makes it more valuable than Switzerland Apple has achieved a record-breaking market capitalisation of $700bn - making it more valuable than Switzerland. The cash-laden fruity firm has now become the most expensive company in human history, after its stock rose to a high of $119.75 yesterday. At its peak during trading yesterday, Apple reached a market cap of $703bn …
Personal computing is getting really personal.
Chart the progression of the computer over time. It's gone from huge machines in multiple rooms reading paper tape to handhelds and wrist mounted devices.
The short life of such devices is largely due to their battery powered nature and the fact that devices improve so quickly. Being compact means being non-upgradable.
The reward actually goes to the shareholders and accountants who came up with the share buyback scheme. This is debt-financed (at nearly 0 %) and, therefore, can be offset against tax. The buybacks are, of course, tax as capital gains and not income. Oh, and let's not forget that low interest rates and money printing have caused an equities boom.
All said that, based on P/E, Apple is not as overvalued as say Amazon!
Really? Obsolescent? the iPad 2 has had iOS 4,5,6,7, & 8. If apple was purposely making things obsolete they would not have let it past iOS 6, maybe even 5. The iPhone 4 from 2010 has only just stopped getting iOS updates, almost 5 years on.
Sometimes they move on very quickly leaving things behind normally just 1st gen products, i.e. first intel mac or first iPad or 1st iPhone, but generally they have a long life unless you must have a new feature.
You mean that there are people that put legal money in Switzerland..why...
The Swiss are now going about the process of hanging artwork stolen by the Nazis in one of Berns museums, so the "dirty money side of life" is now entering even the defacto modus operandi. They don't even try to hide the illicitness....as long as it brings them a few more CHFs..
The art museum Berne is taking the pieces of art in CUSTODY, meaning that if a piece has been identified as having been stolen it will be handed over to the rightful owner.
BUT, until a suspicion has been verified, your accusations are just tha: baseless accusation and hatred.
So I suppose that they didn't accept the money stolen by the nazis either and that the World Jewish Congress did not bring a lawsuit against Switzerland either.
And at the same time should we suppose that the Swiss banks never agreed to settle to put 1.2 Billion dollars into Israeli trusts. All this is just pure speculation, huh.
Should we presume that these things never happened and are purely fictitious....
The real cowards are those that take, and continue to take, the spoils of war, fill their pockets and profit from these spoils whilst surfing on the shirtless backs of those that are decimated.
Let's not begin to discuss all the other wars and dictatorships whose spoils get fltered in and out of Swiss banks on a daily basis. Some recent figures
Gadaffi : 360 Million CHF
Mubarak : 410 Million CHF
Ben Ali : 60 Million
What do the clever Swiss bankers do AFTER the dictators fall, they claim to have "discovered" these sums within the banks. They then freeze the assets, do they give the money back to the Egyptians, Libyans , Tunisians, NO, they freeze the money locally in Switzerland...... And it will sit there amassing millions whilst the North Africans suffer. Meanwhile the bankers live comfortably of their "holding fees"
Isn't it strange that so much money went undiscoverd for so long.....
Is this the Switzerland full of humanity that you wish to speak about or are we talking about another hypothetical one....
You know, it is certainly true that Swiss "business men" did not behave all that honourably, and worse. However, Switzerland as a country did not so badly, considering that it was totally surrounded by Germany and its allies or conquered territory. I do not know if you have ever left you island. Had you done so, you may have been surprised that international borders, even between enemy countries, are rarely completely sealed and impossible just to wander over away from roads and habitation.
You may be unaware that London banks too have had a bit of a problem with Nazi Gold in the last couple of decades, as did some American banks. Plucky little Britain hosted (still does some might say), some lovely little Nazi types who openly indulged their taste for mob action and exploited friends and contacts in the not always very fussy establishment. Just look at old copies of the Mail, Express. America was busy turning a blind eye except to the market for oil and materiel right up to and even, some say, after they finally decided, half way through, which side their best interests were lay.
You may have noticed that such genial pursuits as anti-semitism are doing quite nicely in good old Blighty even now, or even especially now, since Moslem immigrants are so much more admired than EU ones.
At least Switzerland is paying compensation and, if you think you have got relatives affected, there is some vast website (no, not got the link - G-gl- it) where you can seek their names and start your claim.
The Bern museum is doing the right thing and has made clear its reservations, what it will accept and what it will do if accepted works are claimed in the future. Your cheap shot is ignorant and your historical memory of a belligerent teenager is what is keeping half the world in an unhappy, murderous state today.
Ouch , the UK is looking terrible but maybe Switzeland is not so clean either
>ou know, it is certainly true that Swiss "business men" did not behave all that honourably, and worse.
So why do they continue with the same practices, why have the Swiss people not forced them to stop. Why, because they too live of the advantages.........
Let's mention a few things that people might not be aware of in this "paradise".
The UBS have been fined multiple times in the last 3 years for illegal practives , they just pay the bill and continue as before. And that's one of the national banks, it's not even worth beginning to imagine what happens in the private ones.
The UDC had a massive anti-immigration, anti-muslim campaign recently but strangely enough this same country is happy to welcome the "rich" arabs with open arms. ( Black sheep and minarets might remind you of the themes). Type UDC into Google images and you will see what I mean. Not what you would call a loving image of Switzerland is it - as an aside the UDC have a strong following they are not marginal.
Drugs problems : how many kilos of cocaine per day in Geneva ( Zurich is no better). For anyone that doesn't know Geneva is a tiny city with a huge consomation of cocaine per capita. And what about all that Kosovar/Balkans heroin thats keeps turning up, or is that just a coincidence that is is run through Switzerland.
The 16 year prostitution age limit : Yes that's right, it is "legal" for 16 year old to be prostitues.
The Permit L - In order to hide the "importation" of prostitutes the Swiss have developed the Permit L which allows for cheap prostitutes from eastern europe to be brought into the country then thrown out after a year).
FINA : Let's not even begin to talk about Sepp Blatter - Footballs mafia Don Corlione.
How many illegal portugese and working in the building sites... How many........
And all this is simply buiness as usual within a diameter of about 5 kms around the United Nations and a multitide of other NGOs. Double standards, doesn't even begin to describe the situation.
Shock, horror, we realise that Switzerland is just another little corrupt nation, that's not what the propoganda tells us, is it.
Yes, there are some wonderfull things in Switzerland but unfortunately many of them rely on the illicit monies remaining within the Swiss banks, this is after all what keeps the Swiss Franc strong.
But I digress, let's not speak about the problems, in Switzerland it's not polite to speak about these things.
UDP? Perhaps you mean the SVP, a political party, you know, like Conservative, BNP, UKIP?
As pointed out, borders around Switzerland are not made of seawater.. Switzerland has got a far higher proportion of foreigners than panicking Britain, in some places up to 40%, overall over 20%, without the excuse of being an empire hangover. Actually several Continental countries have a higher proportion than Britain.
UBS, along with RBS, HSBC, and banks from almost every European country as well as a couple of USA banks.
Drugs? Mafia? Prostitution? Ever heard of a small place called London, or even smaller ones such as Manchester? France and Germany have all got problems. You do know that even in puritan Britain the legal age for sex and marriage is 16? So why is prostitution any different? Except in Switzerland it is licensed, with health checks etc rather than under the carpet and run by pimps and paedophiles, with collaboration up to local government level in some areas it seems.
No country is clean, especially if you want to dredge through its past. Britain, Holland, Belgium nad others come out particularly badly in relation to, for example, slavery or opium. Britain entrenches in law a miminum wage that is not liveable. Its current attitude to immigrants is particularly nasty - we take your labour- just take low pay and get no return for your taxes (proposals to restrict income benefits, health care). Financially, so glad I am not part of the cesspit in London's financial markets.
No idea what Switzerland did to you - or are you equally spiteful and vindictive to all countries?
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From the Guardian :
"The museum chief’s remarks followed an agreement signed in Berlin on Monday between Germany and Switzerland which will see Bern taking on several hundred works from the collection – much of which works amassed during the Nazi era and included paintings and drawings by Marc Chagall, Claude Monet and Pablo Picasso.
But under the agreement, works whose owners have yet to be identified will be left in Germany until their provenance has been traced."
They are not 'worth' more - Switzerland is 'worth' far more than it's GROSS DOMESTIC PRODUCT which is what it produces in 1 year. Now if you compared the revenue of Apple to the GDP of Switzerland you would be closer but still that does not take account of assets.
I'd imagine if Switzerland were for sale for $700bn there would be quite a few buyers.
Their 7:1 stock split lowered their stock price to the point where everyone could get a piece of Apple and bought in. With demand to buy, of course stock value will rise. BUT their overall market share is slipping and that price is artificial. It will correct in time and come down. The regular people seeing their investment diminish will dump the same stock and the price will fall probably causing a rapid price contraction.
Market cap is totally dependent on the stock price x the number of shares outstanding and has nothing to do with the actual asset value of a company. Apple marketing happily ignores this fact for their press releases.
Apple's falling market share is irrelevant. The only thing that matters is Apple's own sales, which are still rising. Or are you so dense you believe that a company that sells 100 widgets to capture 20% of a 500 widget market is somehow worth less if next year they sell 200 widgets to capture 10% of a 2000 widget market?
Apple's P/E is at the market average. Much more in line than Google's which is nearly double Apple's P/E, or Amazon's which is an order of magnitude larger yet (in the rare quarters when Amazon even makes a profit)
Not saying Apple can't fall, obviously it can - even if their sales keep rising. But the fundamentals behind the stock price are very real. No bubbles and not even overvalued by traditional and fairly conservative pricing methodologies.
The thing is Apple are still making the products people want, as for being overpriced - well when you consider TCO I'm not sure there is really that much difference and in terms of valuation they are nowhere near some of the crazy PE multiples of some of their peers and Apple are making real profits and have real cash sitting there. I would not be surprised to see Apple be the first to hit $1 trillion valuation.
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Try saying that to the vision-impaired person who, having spend years struggling with Windows and paying a fortune for accessibility software, discovers said accessibility software is included at no extra charge on all Apple devices and is invariably the cheaper and better option.
A single seat of SuperNova for a VI person is £695: add a cheap PC for £300 and that's the best part of a grand. You can get a mid-range iMac for that and software for not only the blind and vision-impaired, but also the physically disabled, is already there. You can even get an entry-level Mac mini, screen, keyboard and mouse for about £550 if you're on a serious budget.
I work with the vision-impaired and to see how the Mac transforms their lives after having used Windows is very satisfying.
As Tim Cook said recently, "When we develop software for the disabled, I don't consider the bloody ROI!"
=:~)
GDP is related to a country's economic activity whereas market cap. is related to what people are prepared to pay for the shares - there's no easy way of judging that IMHO.
It's a little like comparing income to assets generally income will usually be a lot less than assets
How is a country's GDP comparable to a company's market capitalisation? Surely a better comparison would be something like GDP vs revenue (but then you'd be down to somewhere like Honduras), or maybe market capitalisation vs net national wealth (Switzerland would be over $4 tn).
If I had that much I wouldn't squander it on 538,876,058 basic models. I'd have the better specced version, just one though, mustn't be greedy.
And a new Ferrari.
And a big house in London.
And Roman Abramovich's yacht.
And a night out with Claudia Schiffer
And another night
And another night
....
...
..
And 10 lottery tickets.
Stupid article, meaningless comparison.
You cannot buy Switzerland for 700 bn. You couldn't even buy a medium sized Swiss city for that. You could, in theory buy all of Apple for 700 bn. The Swissers couldn't buy apple, because they are already spending their GDP on hospitals and schools and machine guns under the bed. So the trying to equate the two is completely hatstand. Do you see?
Can we look forward to future reg articles comparing the top speed of the latest Jag with the weight of BMWs new factory, or the area of a football pitch with the number of hair transplants that Wazza Rooney has had?
Apple's turnover for the financial year to the end of October was apparently $1.82e11.
This places them somewhere around Ukraine, Romania, New Zealand and Kuwait, depending on which figures you look at.
Apple's market valuation is somewhat higher than the total reserves of the Swiss national bank (about $5.3e11), but that is clearly a fraction of the value of the country.
Comparing a corporate valuation to a country's GDP? Eeeek!
GDP is value added in one year. Closely akin to income.
Corporate valuation is total value. Closely akin to wealth.
Wealth is a stock, income a flow. The stock is worth the net present value of the future flow.
Thus Switzerland earns in a year the current net present value of all of Apple's future earnings.
The actual comparison between a corporate number and GDP is the value added of the corporation in one year. Usually taken to be (this isn't exact but it's good enough) profits plus wages paid within the company.
Eeeek!
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It's a bit of a ludicrous comparison.
A country's value is a lot more than its economic output. It's actually somewhere to live, somewhere to be from, it has priceless assets like scenery and cultural resources that are just not comparable to raw GDP figures.
Same applies to any country really. They're all pretty special.
Ever wandered what is the total worth of Apple's tangible and intangible fixed assets? That's their buildings, furniture, labs, computers, licenses, etc. that they actually own. That is the real value of Apple, which I estimate at less than 2 bn USD. That's what they are really worth. Come a theoretical NYSE crash, and Apple is worth just 2 bn USD, provided there is a buyer.
That's true for a lot of public (as in, stock market) companies. The working of it all annoys me quite a bit. Shares were supposed to represent "stock", i.e. assets. Now they're just whatever some greed-fuelled gamblers dream up; not only that, but you can make cash out of options on the stock, i.e. vapour of something that is in itself not much more than vapour. And out of options on options. Too meta, much? If an online casino tried that crap they would be shut down faster that you can say "Is that a copter I hear coming?". And when the big players slip, they're bailed out with our tax money.
OK, beer time. It's good for my blood pressure.
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