Despite the terrible market performance in the last few days, there has been one very interesting shift. The uncertainty in the market has driven down the cost of oil, which in effect has driven down the cost of Exxon Mobil, which has been up until now the most valuable company in the world. Exxon’s stock fell to $67.43, which means that its market value is now $327.9 billion. And that means someone else has beat them…
Apple‘s stock price rose almost 5% to $369.89 on the Nasdaq, reaching a market capitalization of $342.9 billion. Apple’s recent success with iPhone and also the iPad has resulted in a 42% return in the last year, something which many people believe they will not sustain. However, recent sales figures show that iPad is starting to eat into the laptop market, which might lend some creedence to Jobs’s “truck vs car” metaphor, which he spoke about the D8 conference.
“When we were an agrarian nation, all cars were trucks because that’s what you needed on the farms.” Cars became more popular as cities rose, and things like power steering and automatic transmission became popular.
“PCs are going to be like trucks,” Jobs said. “They are still going to be around.” However, he said, only “one out of x people will need them.”
Clearly people are starting to vote with their dollars, and it seems we might be really approaching the Post-PC era, now that the most valuable company in the world makes most of its money from these post-PC devices. Just to put it into perspective – there is currently 222 million iOS based devices out there, and in the last quarter alone they sold more than 9 million iPads. They are selling one every 3 seconds (probably more by now).
What makes this phenomenal growth even more amazing is that in the middle 90’s Apple was almost bankrupt. Luckily they managed to convince Steve Jobs to return, and eventually take the helm. When Jobs returned to Apple, the share price was around the $6 mark…
If only I had a time machine.
Source: Bloomberg
