Can Google or Huawei stymie Apple’s march towards $4trn?
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. To call Apple a corporate behemoth is to be uncharitable. It is much bigger than that.
On many financial measures it makes more sense to compare the iPhone-maker not with other companies but with stockmarket indices—and not some obscure ones, either. Exclude financial firms and India’s Nifty 50 sit on less cash. When Apple reports its annual results on October 31st analysts reckon its net profit will be just below what Germany’s DAX blue chips raked in last year.
On October 21st its market capitalisation nudged $3.6trn, more than Hong Kong’s Hang Seng. Rivals in Apple’s core smartphone market look puny next to the colossus of Cupertino. Samsung, a down-on-its-luck South Korean electronics conglomerate which sells more handsets globally than any other firm, is worth one-thirteenth as much, despite also boasting a huge semiconductor business.
Xiaomi, a Chinese challenger whose devices outsold iPhones in August, generates less than 5% of Apple’s gross profit. The average iPhone sells for $900, compared with $300 for a Samsung and half that for a Xiaomi. Google, a Silicon Valley neighbour with a tidy digital-ad operation and growing hardware ambitions, shifted $5bn-worth of Pixel phones in 2023—which against a $200bn screen of iPhone sales looks, well, like a pixel.
Competition? What competition? Going by Wall Street analysts’ targets for Apple’s share price, it seems nothing can stand in the way of its triumphant march towards $4trn. Still, the iPhone’s everlasting presence in the world’s deepest pockets cannot be taken for granted. In many ways, its position appears less certain than it has been in years.
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