Apple Stock News
The race to get the title of first trillion dollar market cap is getting closer to the finish line. Apple is sitting pretty with an $868B market cap. Alphabet Inc. (Google) is in second place at $712B. Amazon is in third at $556B. Facebook is in fourth at $512B. But Apple hasn’t always been in the lead. It was temporarily overtaken by Alphabet Inc. in 2016.
What makes Apple the favorite in this horserace? It’s not valuation. Since Apple’s biggest driver is the iPhone, they are priced more like a hardware company. That’s why Apple’s PE is 18 whereas Alphabet’s is 37, Amazon’s is 294, and Facebook’s is 34. Although, Apple is investing heavily in its high growth Services business which could help to increase Apple’s P/E multiple in the future.
The main reason Apple is in first place is the tech giant generates so much darn profit. They earn the vast majority of the profits of the entire smartphone space. One significant differentiating factor that has helped them do this is their success in China. Out of the four tech behemoths mentioned above, Apple is the only one that has truly flourished in the People’s Republic. China is too big to ignore with 20% of the globe’s population. In Apple’s 2017 fiscal year, they generated $44.8B in revenue from Greater China. Even though that number decreased 8% YoY, it still amounted to 20% of Apple’s total revenue. That 20% figure is much higher than the Chinese revenue generated from the other three tech titans.
Facebook doesn’t operate in China. Alphabet does operate there, but many of its core services are severely restricted. Amazon operates there as well, but is not even close to becoming a major player.
The Middle Kingdom’s significance to Apple has definitely incentivized them to keep the Chinese regulators happy. This results in Apple removing hundreds of VPN apps from the Chinese App Store as well as building a data center in China to house Chinese users’ data. Apple may not always like the Chinese regulations, but they certainly aren’t pulling out of China anytime soon.
For the latest Apple Stock News, AAPL closed at $169.01 per share on December 6th, 2017. It generated losses of 0.37% from its previous close on December 5th, 2017, when it closed at $169.64 per share.
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