How Apple Beat Microsoft
Microsoft have been over taken by Apple in market value, the tech gurus finished last quarter with a market value of $222.07bn, a mere $3bn above Microsoft. The news comes after the stock market closed with Apple shares down 0.45% but Microsoft MCTS Training down by 4.07%.
The California-based tech giant was only beaten by oil giants ExxonMobil with a $278.64bn market value. To buy a share in Apple would now cost you 10 times what it would have a decade ago, just a year before new boss Steve Jobs launched a series of revolutionary products including the most iconic product of the 21st century, the iPod.
This is not the first time Apple have had a higher market value than Microsoft, in December 1989 the over took them for a short period of time and the company whose operating system runs on more than 90% of the world’s computers has never been able to match the growth rates it experienced in the 1990s. Contrary to Apple, Microsoft stock has decreased by 20% in ten years.
But not is all lost for Microsoft as they made a $150m investment to the company in 1997 to keep them afloat, at the time Gates’ company was worth more than five times that of Jobs. Despite the valuation, Microsoft still leads Apple in sales, in the last quarter, Microsoft reported $14.5bn revenue compared to Apple’s $13.5bn. Apple only recently surpassed Walmart in market value to become the 3rd largest company in the world.
This places a tech company just below an Oil giant, the leader in an industry that has all but ruled the world for the last fifty years. It shows a fundamental shift in society. Consumer electronics, software and technology are valued higher than the fuel that arguably supports our way of life, for now.
Over the next decade it will be interesting to see how the market plays out. Many companies are reaching unprecedented value with little or no physical output, for example, Google is one of the most powerful companies in the world Microsoft MCITP Training, not just because of their net worth, but their undeniable stranglehold on the internet and a an unrivalled potential. Facebook has been about only 6 years, its founder and CEO is barely out of University yet his company now has an estimated value of $20bn. Perhaps the number one company in 10 years time has not even been founded yet.
