Nothing stops technology companies in 2023. And one of the best examples is Apple: the Californian giant has surpassed its all-time highs on the stock market this Friday and is worth more than three trillion dollars again. The company founded by Steve Jobs has seen his shares rise more than 2.3% this Friday, and aims to close the week with an advance of almost 4%. The Nasdaq —the US stock index that brings together the big tech it has appreciated almost 33% this year and closes the best first half since 1983. Its selective, the Nasdaq 100, has risen even more, 40%, in a record first half of the year.
Apple was, in August 2018, the first company to overcome the trillion barrier – one million million. The ceiling did not last long, because two years later it exceeded two trillion dollars in market capitalization. On the first day of listing in 2022, it managed to reach three trillion. That first day of 2022, the share of the apple company was paid at $182.86 during the session, although it closed the day below that capitalization. This Friday for the first time it has exceeded the figure at the close of the session.
Apple’s share price had already broken its all-time high, but because the company has been buying back and redeeming shares, its capitalization had not exceeded three trillion dollars again until this Friday. Trading at $193.07 half an hour after opening, it has set a new record. It has closed at $193.97, with a value of $3.05 trillion. So far in 2023, its shares have skyrocketed more than 55%.
Apple takes an advantage of about 500,000 million over Microsoft, the second largest company by value on the stock market. The third is the public oil company Saudi Aramco, with 2.1 trillion, followed by Alphabet, the parent of Google (1.5 trillion), Amazon (1.3 trillion) and Nvidia (1.05 trillion), the last to join the exclusive trillion dollar club. Tesla and Meta, the Facebook group, once belonged to it, but are now far away.
The last three years have been one of great ups and downs for the technology sector on the stock market: in 2021, it was the big winner in world stock markets that have doubled their value since the start of the pandemic. The Nasdaq 100 posted a gain for the year of more than 26%. Last year, however, the tables were turned. It was the worst year for the markets since the financial crisis of 2008 and technology was no exception: the Nasdaq sank more than 33%. Apple shares dropped 26.8% of their value in that year.
The push in the sector comes mainly from the fever for artificial intelligence. Microsoft shares, for example, have appreciated almost 50% so far this year, after having made an investment of 10,000 million dollars in OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT.
The case of Apple is, however, somewhat more complex: it has been two quarters in a row with slight reductions in sales, but the market seems to trust its long-term leadership in the sale of technology. Billing between January and March of this year was 94,836 million dollars (about 86,100 million euros at the current exchange rate), 3% less than in the same period of 2022.
This time it was the result of product sales falling 5%, to 73,929 million dollars, while services grew 5%, to 20,907 million dollars. Without the currency impact of almost five points, revenue would have grown.
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