Nothing will stop tech companies in 2023. And one of the best examples is Apple: the California giant surpassed its all-time highs in the stock market this Friday and is again worth more than three trillion dollars. Shares in the Steve Jobs-founded company are up more than 2.3% this Friday and are set to close the week up nearly 4%. The Nasdaq — the U.S. stock index that brings together big tech companies — is up nearly 33% this year, completing its best first half since 1983. Its selective index, the Nasdaq 100, is up even more in the first half of the year, up 40% in a record year.
Apple became the first company to surpass the trillion mark – one million million – in August 2018. The cap didn’t last long, as two years later it surpassed the $2 trillion market cap. On the first day of listing in 2022, it managed to hit three trillion. On this first day of 2022, the apple company’s stock was paid for the session at $182.86, despite ending the day below that capitalization. This Friday it exceeded the closing value of the session for the first time.
Apple’s stock price had already broken its all-time high, but as the company bought back and redeemed shares, its capitalization never broke the $3 trillion mark again as of this Friday. A new record was set at $193.07 half an hour after opening. The closing price was $193.97, a value of $3.05 trillion. So far in 2023, its shares are up more than 55%.
Apple has an advantage of about $500,000 million over Microsoft, the second largest company by value on the stock market. Third is state oil company Saudi Aramco with 2.1 billion, followed by Alphabet, the parent company of Google (1.5 billion), Amazon (1.3 billion) and Nvidia (1.05 billion), the last member of the exclusive Billion Dollar Clubs. Tesla and Meta, the Facebook group, were once a part of it but are now far away.
The last three years have been a big ups and downs for the tech sector in the stock market: In 2021 it was the big winner on world stock markets, which have doubled in value since the pandemic began. The Nasdaq 100 was up more than 26% for the year. Last year, however, the tables changed. It was the worst year for markets since the 2008 financial crisis, and technology was no exception: the Nasdaq fell more than 33%. Apple shares lost 26.8% of their value this year.
The boom in the industry is mainly due to enthusiasm for artificial intelligence. Microsoft stock, for example, is up nearly 50% so far this year after investing $10,000 million in OpenAI, the creators of ChatGPT.
Apple’s case is a bit more complex, though: It’s had two straight quarters of modest sales declines, but the market seems confident in its long-term leadership in selling technology. Billings between January and March of this year totaled $94,836 million (about €86,100 million at current exchange rates), down 3% from the same period in 2022.
This time, it was the result of a 5% decline in product sales to $73,929 million, while services grew 5% to $20,907 million. Without the currency impact of almost five points, sales would have increased.
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