Why do people even care? Has consumer culture so overtaken our minds that we identify personally with the things that we buy?
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Apple Is Not The Most Valuable Company In The History Of The World — IBM Is
21–30 of 82 posts
Re: Apple Is Not The Most Valuable Company In The History Of The World — IBM Is
#22>.... [Apple] would have a value of more than $3 trillion by 2020. As the Times points out, that is bigger than the 2011 gross domestic product of France or Brazil. Comparing an outlandish guess for a 2020 market cap versus a 2012 gross domestic product (a flow of money, not a store) is hand waving, not analysis.
Also, extrapolating without much explanation means squat.
Re: Apple Is Not The Most Valuable Company In The History Of The World — IBM Is
#23Actually to really compare the weight the company had in its days it is more meaningful to compare its market cap to GDP.
Wolfram Alpha gives me 852 billion for 1967 so IBMs market cap was approx. 22.5% of that. 2012's estimated GPD is 15.6 trillion thus Apple has a mere 4.2% of that.
That was how big IBM really felt back then.
Re: Apple Is Not The Most Valuable Company In The History Of The World — IBM Is
#24When are these numbers ever inflation adjusted? Biggest grossing movie of all time inflation adjusted is still Gone With the Wind, but that didn't really stop people from talking about Titanic or Avatar.
Well, funny enough, if you look at the hacker news thread about Avatar hitting 1B, it is in fact discussed (one of the people mentioning it is me). I stand by this, just as with movies: it matters. If not these numbers are completely arbitrary and meaningless. It is equivalent to comparing, numerically, the price of one company in Pesos vs the price of another in Dollars, it would make no sense unless they are both c…
Oh, I kind of agree, but this just seems like "neener, neener, not the biggest."
To take a different angle, computers and electronics have only gotten cheaper since 1967. So maybe Apple should be compared to a deflation adjusted IBM market cap. How would those numbers stack up?
Re: Apple Is Not The Most Valuable Company In The History Of The World — IBM Is
#25Why do people even care? Has consumer culture so overtaken our minds that we identify personally with the things that we buy?
I can only speak for myself, but I find facts such as these interesting.
And perhaps there's something less negative than "consumer culture" at play… humans are generally curious about and interested in extraordinary things. e.g. Olympic athletes, inordinately successful businesses and business people, brilliant artists, robots landing on other planets, etc.
Re: Apple Is Not The Most Valuable Company In The History Of The World — IBM Is
#26Why do people even care? Has consumer culture so overtaken our minds that we identify personally with the things that we buy?
When you see people BUYING t-shirts which are blatant advertising of popular brands, then you reach that point where people identify themselves to a brand before all.
That has been the case for a LONG time already.
Re: Apple Is Not The Most Valuable Company In The History Of The World — IBM Is
#27What about what ever entities that went after the Spice islands? Or east india company? I guess they were commissioned from the monarchies or parliment themselves so perhaps they don't count. Perhaps the oil companies of today?
either way it would be interesting to know, if records still exists about their worth.
From what I understand, it was the oil, sugar, or gold of its day. Controlling the spice islands was akin to controlling international trade.
Re: Apple Is Not The Most Valuable Company In The History Of The World — IBM Is
#28A few years ago, PetroChina was worth more than one trillion USD at the Shanghai stock exchange:
http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/story.aspx?guid=%7BA16...
Re: Apple Is Not The Most Valuable Company In The History Of The World — IBM Is
#29Why do people even care? Has consumer culture so overtaken our minds that we identify personally with the things that we buy?
Some people own stock.
Others just like stats. How much of the world's brain matter is used up by sports trivia?
Re: Apple Is Not The Most Valuable Company In The History Of The World — IBM Is
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
The dividends issued historically are gone, entirely separate from the company. Assets and liabilities can exist in different forms, including tricky ones like depreciation and intangible assets. If such 'value' is accounted for important uses, manipulating it will be much cheaper and easier than manipulating market cap anyway.
Sure, it's hard to measure the value of assets. But look at it this way: In the long run, every company dies, so assets always go to zero. What investors (in aggregate) are left with is the net sum of dividends paid out. To answer "what is the most valuable company in history" I would look for the company which paid out the most in dividends before it expired. Stock price is largely a measure of which company has man…
Don't know why people would downvote this. It's a pretty good idea of how to measure the value of a company. It's somewhat shy of the true metric which would be along the lines of 'how much better it made the world'. Market cap is appealing because it's trivial.
These definitions would also allow comparing non-standard corporations, like churches and states. It seems like this is a natural comparison - it's inevitable that big companies are ranked among comparable countries.