Apple has become the first US-listed company to be valued at a trillion dollars after its third-quarter earnings exceeded Wall Street's expectations.
The company founded by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak was worth $3bn when Jobs returned to revitalise Apple in 1996.
On Thurday 2nd August 2018, the share price of the iPhone maker jumped by 2.8% to $207.05, passing the $1tn (£762bn) mark in New York trading.
Its stock has soared 9% since Tuesday when Apple’s third-quarter earnings exceeded Wall Street’s expectations.
The company, which was started in a garage in Palo Alto by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak in 1976, has transformed the way people communicate with its ubiquitous iPhone.
When the iPhone was introduced in 2007 it kicked off a smartphone revolution, leaving the giants of the mobile phone industry Nokia and Blackberry struggling for survival.
Alphabet, the parent of Google, scrambled to provide its Android software to power mobile phones, making sure Apple didn’t steal a huge march on rivals.
That helped Samsung to become the world’s biggest mobile phone manufacturer, while China’s Huawei overtook Apple to become the second-largest smartphone seller this week.
Apple has turned to the courts to protect its advantage and won multi-million dollar payouts from Samsung for allegedly copying some of its technology.
Last year, sales had risen to $229bn and profits to $48.4bn, making it the most profitable public-listed US company.
While Apple is the first company to hit the trillion dollar mark, it is likely to be followed by Alphabet, Amazon and Microsoft. Amazon is currently worth $875bn, Alphabet is valued at $850bn and Microsoft $823bn.
Apple isn’t the first company to reach the trillion dollar mark, however. Back in 2007, Chinese state-controlled oil company PetroChina hit that level on the first day of trading after its 2007 listing in Shanghai. But those calculations were based only on the newly listed class of shares, and not the price of Hong Kong-listed shares that were already trading and remained at a much lower valuation.
But its rise to the summit was short-lived, with the financial crisis and the collapse in the oil prices taking care of that. It is currently worth about $220bn (£167bn).
