Apple Tops Exxon in Market Cap
courtesy of Apple Inc.For most of the past two years, Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL) held the top spot as the most valuable company in the world as measured by market cap, having wrestled the crown away from Exxon Mobil Corp.…
For most of the past two years, Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL) held the top spot as the most valuable company in the world as measured by market cap, having wrestled the crown away from Exxon Mobil Corp. (NYSE: XOM). In March, Exxon took the lead briefly again and the two have see-sawed back and forth until late last month when Apple started to open up some distance between the two firms.
Apple’s market cap today is about $433 billion, compared with Exxon’s of around $403 billion. Exxon’s market cap reached a peak of around $466 billion in the fall of 2007, when oil prices briefly scared $150 a barrel.
Apple peaked at a market cap of about $613 billion almost exactly five years later. But the company did not break through the $400 billion mark until last December. The steepness of Apple’s rise to its peak is matched only by the steepness of its decline. Roughly $200 billion in valuation gained and lost is not much more than a year.
But in a listing that is virtually meaningless, Apple is now firmly back on top. And Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) with a market cap of around $285 billion has just taken over third place in the league tables from Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ: MSFT), valued at $282 billion.
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Paul Ausick has been writing for 247Wallst.com for more than a decade. He has written extensively on investing in the energy, defense, and technology sectors. In a previous life, he wrote technical documentation and managed a marketing communications group in Silicon Valley.
He has a bachelor's degree in English from the University of Chicago and now lives in Montana, where he fishes for trout in the summer and stays inside during the winter.