Apple briefly became the world’s first $3 trillion dollar company on Tuesday. Soaring stock prices on the first day’s trading of 2022 marked the first time that any publicly traded company had hit the $3 trillion market cap value.
Tuesday saw Apple’s share price briefly skyrocket 3% to reach a record high of $182.88. This took the market cap value above $3 trillion for the first time, although the stock price retreated from that high later on in the day’s trading. This means that Apple hasn’t yet gained official confirmation of being a true $3 trillion dollar company as its market cap would need to be above this level at the end of the day’s trading.
It came on the first trading day of 2022 that saw all markets enjoying broadly positive moves. The S&P rose by 0.6% to record levels and the Dow Jones Industrial Average also set a new high with a rise of 0.7%.
2022 is widely expected to be yet another big year for Apple. This is because the tech giant is poised to expand beyond smartphones, tablets and computers to introduce its first augmented reality headset in late spring early summer.
However, it’s worth nothing that Apple might soon have some company in the $3 trillion club. Its fierce rival, Microsoft, is worth approximately $2.5 trillion while Alphabet, Amazon and Tesla all have market cap values in excess of $1 trillion. Meta had once been above the $1 trillion mark, but the parent company of Facebook’s market cap has since dropped below that level.
Apple’s rise to become a $3 trillion company is hardly surprising. After all, it hit the $1 trillion mark in August 2018 and reached the $2 trillion threshold just two years later. If anything, Apple is growing even more successful in recent years with shares in the tech company up over 34% last year. This is even more remarkable as Apple was one of the major tech companies to have been hit hard by the supply chain crisis that affected the production of key computer chips.
All of this has been made possible thanks to the public’s insatiable appetite for new tech products such as last year’s iPhone 13. But Apple has also been smart to diversify its output away from purely technological affairs as can be seen in the success of subscription services such as Apple Music and Apple TV+. This has helped reduce Apple’s reliance on its standard technological output such as the iPhone down from 60% in 2018 to just 52% in 2021.
As such, there will be plenty of investors who will be questioning whether Apple can sustain its meteoric rise. But with a new virtual reality headset in the pipeline and a fascinating move into automated car technology to be unveiled, it seems that the market simply cannot get enough of Apple.
