Saudi Aramco overtakes Apple as world’s most valuable company

theguardian.com:

Apple has lost its crown as the world’s most valuable company to oil giant Saudi Aramco, as soaring commodity prices swell profits at energy companies and technology stocks continue to slide.

In a sign that the old economy is reasserting itself over the new this year, Saudi Aramco eclipsed Apple on Wednesday night amid the ongoing rout on Wall Street.

Apple, which had become the world’s first 3 trillion dollar company in early January, saw its shares sink another 5% on Wednesday, knocking its value down to $2.37tn (£1.94tn) – an 18% drop this year.

This pulled the iPhone maker’s valuation below Aramco, whose market capitalisation has climbed by a quarter this year to hit $2.43tn, stoked by the surge in oil prices since the Ukraine war began.

Aramco’s rise comes a decade after the watershed moment in 2011 when Apple surpassed another energy giant, ExxonMobil, to become the world’s most valuable listed company. Since then, Apple, Microsoft, Google’s owner Alphabet and Amazon have dominated stock markets, hitting and then surpassing $1tn valuations and pushing oil giants out of the top ranks. Only Saudi Aramco has regularly featured among the most valuable.

Neil Wilson of Markets.com said there was “something symbolic in tech being overtaken by oil”, adding that “this steamroller of a bear market” was pushing stocks down.

The two companies have traded the top spot before. Aramco became the world’s biggest listed company when it floated on Saudi Arabia’s Tadawul stock exchange in December 2019, and would have been bigger than Exxon if it had been a public company a decade ago. Apple surged back to overtake Aramco in July 2020 as the pandemic boosted demand for technology products and services.

This latest changing of the guard