Apple becomes the first $1T company

Just to give some context, the first publicly traded company to hit $1T USD market cap was Petrol China, but that was only in HK, in mainland china, its stock were never valued more than $500B. And it has only 5% of stock in HK open market.

Compare to AAPL today.

Apple still has a ridiculously low P/E of ~17. Which is how everyone values a hardware company. And has stayed within this P/E range since the death of Steve Jobs. Apple hasn't been selling more iPhone than the last super cycle aka iPhone 6, which is when the plus version was first introduced. But Apple's iPhone ASP has been up $100+, and Apple has been buying back LOTS of share, which is one of the main reason pushing its stock price upwards.

A lot of analyst likes to focus on the flat unit sales, and the higher ASP. In reality it is the user base growth that is much more important. Tim Cook mentioned a double digit percentage growth in iPhone. That puts Apple with close to 800M active iPhone users. Roughly 70M+ of iPhone users coming are either new to smartphone or switching from Android. So while Apple's iPhone sales has been flat for a few years, its iPhone user base has matched from 600M to 800M. Given the moat, or the stickiness of Apple ecosystem, users are likely going to buy another iPhone, staying within the ecosystem than going to Android.

The Mac are also adding lots of new users, 60% of Mac buyer are new to Apple. This continuous trend means Apple is adding 10M new Mac users YoY. The last reported figure there were roughly 150M active Mac users. If we look at the sales figures and Active Mac users over time, it is clear the average Mac lifecycle is now on 4 - 5 years before upgrade.

The iPad has roughly 300M, may be now closer to 400M iPad users. Again while the sales hasn't grown, its user base is growing.

Both Horace Dediu and Benedict Evans are expecting 1.5 billion Active devices by either late 2018 or mid 2019. As impossible it may seems, Apple is STILL growing its user base.

And there are few more things to fuel future growth. The rumoured of slightly cheaper iPhone and Mac. We should have a sub $700 6.1" LCD iPhone coming this September. Along with a better sub $1000 entry level MacBook. And I believe the best iPad has yet to come, still with lots of potentials.

Yes, I hate the TouchBar, Yes I absolutely hate the new bloody keyboard they put on MacBook. And I don't like FaceID much, still prefer under screen finger print. But all these aside, Apple is still doing extremely well, and its bigger picture is good with no immediate risk at its current valuation. Cant say the same for Microsoft, Google, or Amazon. And they have just finish moving into its new Spaceship. There are lots of mental preparation and inefficiency involved when moving to a whole campus. I hope they are now settle and up their productivity.

To sum it up, with a P/E less then 20, and the most Net Cash ( ~$130B ) any company has in the world, they are truly worth their $1T Market Cap.

Congrats AAPL.

P.S - Steve probably would have sent another note to all employees about Dell. :P

I have a friend who bought low and didn't think about selling until he had about $300,000 worth. Except he stored them on MtGox and they were gone.

DDG claims to have multiple searches, like local or specialized search engines, but if Bing shuts down they would probably be in trouble.

That said it’s irrelevant. Microsoft is happy to keep the competition alive for Google and I bet they are winning some revenue from their DDG deal, so it’s a win win.

And if DDG gets big enough, and it probably is already, they can develop their own web crawler - because in case you don’t know, it’s the crawling part that’s really expensive.

Quite a funny hybrid indeed: if I pay you to take my money, and you pay me to take your money, somehow GDP would have increased.

It's a measure of economic activity (of which our little give-and-take game would be an example) and it is meaningful under the assumption that all that activity happens for more rational reasons than just trolling economists. Note that our little give-and-take game would be a very expensive example of such trolling, if somehow the tax-man got involved.

#1 is a good point. Samsung's cash pile is $40 billion, decent but quite a bit smaller. Apple should be worth more than Samsung, just the size of the difference seems a bit out of step.

About this moat. A fab is not exactly a shoe, it's not something that anyone can just do. The idea that Apple would make their own memory is out there. Apple still uses TSMC or Samsung to make their SoCs, and will have to keep paying those companies for that. Designing the chips is relatively low cost in comparison. Apple cannot easily just make their own. I mean this stuff is advanced technology, it's at least harder than switching from iPhone to Android. People talk a lot about the wall garden and how that prevents switching but this moat is theoretical, it's never been tested. Apple has been good about keeping pace or in front of the competition hardware wise. For a company making good products it deserves the profits, but if it falls behind I don't expect the "moat" to save it. Majority of apps people use are free and are cross-platform. There are only a handful of relevant apps like iMessage or Sketch that are truly apple exclusive. Mac sales have been declining recently and I personally use 5 platforms, linux, mac, windows, ios, android and have no major problems.

#3 :)