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Apple Is Not The Most Valuable Company In The History Of The World — IBM Is

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Re: Apple Is Not The Most Valuable Company In The History Of The World — IBM Is

#81

Post by D_Alex »

maxerickson wrote: post #56
D_Alex wrote: post #32

Rockefeller's Standard Oil was possibly even more valuable - at the time of it's anti-trust mandated breakup it produced around 90% of USA's oil. The companies it split into became Exxon, Mobil, Chevron, Amoco, Conoco, Unilever (!) and a whole bunch of others.

I'm playing wiki-facts here, but Unilever bought one of the breakup companies in 1987. The Unilever conglomerate established itself very much without being part of Standard Oil.

I checked up and you are quite correct. Unilever bought Ponds which in turn grew out of a vaseline manufacturer previously owned by Standard Oil.

Re: Apple Is Not The Most Valuable Company In The History Of The World — IBM Is

#82

Post by nasmorn »

hollerith wrote: post #69
nasmorn wrote: post #23

Actually 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.

There was a huge error in the OP as explained in http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4411478 . If we correct the error, we conclude that in 1967, IBM's market cap was approximately 3.3% of US GDP. That seems much more reasonable to me. Although IBM owned much more of the market for computers than Apple does, the role of computers in society has expanded drastically. E.g., there was no consumer computer market at all…

Thank you I was unaware. I thought it looked quite high but decided not to check. Your explanation also didn't occur to me I rationalized it away with their monopoly position but of course the IBM monopoly must have been worth less than the MSFT monopoly given the enormous expansion in market size.
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