Apple Passes $300B Market Cap, 2nd In the World 485
An anonymous reader writes "In May, Apple surpassed Microsoft in market capitalization to become the second largest company (by that measure) in the world. Today, with its shares riding high, Apple passed $300 billion in market cap, entering a club of two along with the still-gigantic ExxonMobile. And investors' targets could bring Apple beyond where Exxon is now (though Exxon continues to soar as well). Perhaps Wall Street is catching on that, despite the discontinuation of their underused Xserve, Apple is in fact becoming one of the key tech providers to enterprise, a position that even a year ago seemed laughable. If you consider the iPad to be a PC (which enterprise increasingly is), then suddenly you realize that Apple is expected to climb to 12% market share in 2011. Plus, of course, they have those little things called iPods, and iTunes..."
If the future is now the iFuture (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Without dividends... (Score:4, Informative)
lololololololololol [wikimedia.org]
Re:Without dividends... (Score:0, Informative)
FYI, Android has already surpassed the iphones market share
No It hasn't
http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/online_mobile/apple-leads-smartphone-race-while-android-attracts-most-recent-customers/
Re:Without dividends... (Score:2, Informative)
Why are these ignorant comments consistently modded +5 insightful?
Well, this is Slashdot. The people who actually know stuff fled this place long ago.
Sometimes, the bigger they are the bigger they get (Score:4, Informative)
P/E for Apple is actually not all that high. What you are overlooking is that Apple's valuation is so high because they are doing great in :
a) media sales
b) portable music player sales
c) smartphone sales
d) laptop sales
e) tablet sales
The thing is that Apple has a lot of products in very new and rapidly growing markets. If you think about pretty much any one of those categories and think about room for growth, you'll realize the apple share price is still pretty conservative.
Oh, and don't forget about the massiv Apple cash reserve which they've not even deployed to any great extent.
Re:I hate to break it to you... (Score:4, Informative)
Exxon Mobil's 2010 profits of $19 Billion on $285 Billion in revenue [cnn.com] completely dwarf Apple's 2010 profit of $6 billion on $36 billion in revenue [cnn.com]. Granted Apple has a higher profit margin than Exxon Mobil, but in 2009 [cnn.com] Exxon Mobil's profits were greater than Apple's revenue.
Your numbers are _not_ 2010 numbers. You are comparing 2009 numbers. Maybe the fact that Apple's profit is now $14bn on $64bn revenue explains the share price.
Re:MS owns a big bite of Apple (Score:4, Informative)
Re:My Apple Macbook experience... (Score:4, Informative)
Obviously, novice users will see that they can plug in the NTFS-formatted drives from Windows and see the files, but not copy anything to it. I'm not sure how often this scenario would come up, though. In my experience, you'd deal with FAT32 far more often and that is fully supported by OS X out of the box.
In any case, once the user finds out the limitation, he/she can google and easily find that there's both a free (NTFS-3G) and paid (Paragon NTFS) way of getting write support. They've been out for quite some time and got polished, so it's not much of a hassle, either.
Re:My Apple Macbook experience... (Score:4, Informative)
Technically Apple bought the company that developed CUPS, and they continue to manage it as an opensource project