The following article has been written by Tripp Mickle and Amrith Ramkumar and published at today’s Wall Street Journal. The SOURCE for the whole article.
Apple Inc. on Thursday became the first U.S. company to surpass $1 trillion in market value, underscoring the iPhone maker’s explosive growth and its role in the technology industry’s ascent to the forefront of the global economy and markets.
Shares of the world’s most valuable public company climbed above $207.04, making it worth $1 trillion overall. The stock has risen more than 21% so far this year, its latest rally coming after it reported strong revenue and profit gains Tuesday as demand for high-price iPhones remained resilient and sales from the app store and other services hit all-time highs.
Apple’s rise has been propelled by the sustained success of the iPhone developed under late co-founder Steve Jobs, a product visionary who helped revive the company from a death spiral in the late 1990s. His successor, Tim Cook, has turned Apple into a cash-generating giant by pushing its existing products to prominence in China and cultivating its fast-growing services business – moves that have helped stave off concerns about the absence of a new, blockbuster device
“We’ve heard a number of times since Mr. Jobs died that the company was going to slip and fall, but they’ve continued to execute,” said Greg Hersch, founder of New York City-based Florence Capital Advisors, which has more than $400 million under management and counts Apple among its largest holdings.
Along the way, Apple has led a broader tech boom that has made a handful of giant companies central in people’s daily lives and investment portfolios. The five most valuable companies–Apple, Amazon.com Inc., Google parent Alphabet Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Facebook Inc.–all recently hailed from tech and internet firms, a level of industry dominance rare in recent markets history. Those five collectively accounted for nearly 15% of the total value of the S&P 500 as of last month, according to Ned Davis Research.
The iPhone, and the smartphone era it birthed, helped lift other tech giants–and disrupted many other businesses. Smartphones drive mobile advertising businesses at Google and Facebook, and account for an increasing share of the e-commerce transactions lifting Amazon.
