Apple becomes the first company to exceed valuation of 1 trillion dollars

A trillion dollars is an outrageous amount of money, and normally in the news, money in the ballpark of 1 trillion USD is only mentioned when considering the economic decisions of entire countries. Apple Inc has recently acquired that level of valuation, as the first technology company that is worth a trillion dollars, ahead of several other major tech companies striving for the same economic milestone. Apple’s shares have risen by 2.7 percent to a high of $207.39, and Apple’s shares has increased by 22 percent only this year. Last year its sales hit $229bn, with profits of $48.4bn, making it the most profitable listed US company. Apple is the world’s largest information technology company by revenue and the world’s third-largest mobile phone manufacturer after Samsung and Huawei. The company employs 123,000 full-time employees and maintains 499 retail stores in 22 countries as of December 2017. It operates the iTunes Store, which is the world’s largest music retailer.

How has Apple become such a corporate behemoth in the tech world? One of the main reasons lies in Apple’s de facto flagship product, the iphone, which the reader would most likely instantly recognise. If you don’t own an iphone, someone else you know probably owns one. Apple sold 216 million iphone units in 2017, and has sold a total of 1 billion iphone units since the 2007, the year in which the first iphone was first released to the world. Main iphone units regularly retail at over 800S$ when released. For the last three years, iphone sales have consistently provided more than 50% of Apple’s revenue, reaching 69.74% of total revenue in the first quarter of 2018. This is keeping in mind that Apple also sells a variety of other product lines, like the macbook, which is used to type this article, the ipod, the ipad etc. Each of these product lines have also retained an influence over american and global tech culture, and garner instant recognition when seen by most people.

While it is commendable that Apple has reached such staggering heights as a company, it is even more surprising to learn that it started from a relatively low place. At its infancy, Apple was headquartered in the garage of its co founder, Steve Jobs. While the company steadily grew in size over the years since it’s departure, the road that it took was far from smooth. Power struggles led to Steve Jobs being ousted out of the company by its board of directors in the year of 1985. From then, revenue for Apple began to dwindle until it was a fraction of its former size as a company. In 1997, Apple decided to purchase Jobs’ company,NeXT, and reinstated Jobs to CEO. Jobs is credited as pivotal to the resultant rise of Apple and the restoration of the company’s former status, eventually introducing the iPhone to the public, which at then, was regarded as a relatively innovative product. He ran the company until his death in 2011. Tim Cook took over as CEO, and with his sharp acumen for business, brought the company forward to its current state, valued over a trillion dollars.

A driving factor for Apple’s success during Job’s reign and onward derives from his unique approach to running the company. He believed in the importance of brand recognition and image. He held the view that consumers who were relatively uninformed about technology would buy products that had a reputable and reliable brand, were simple and intuitive to use, and most importantly, made their lives easier and more convenient. This was the philosophy used in designing the iphone, and the template that was followed for other product lines. Apple products, with their simplicity of use, also brought about a significant level of innovation in their design. Apple designs a majority of their product components in house, and integrates features in their phone that are sometimes the subject of emulation by other consumer technology companies. The Samsung Galaxy S9, which was released several months after the iPhone X, noticeably included features that the iphone x pioneered into the mainstream, such as a face unlock function, and the ability to make animated emoticons that utilised a form of motion capture using the phone front facing cameras. Apple also strives not only to make their products usable for the mainstream public,they also cater to professionals. A significant margin of developers prefer to use the Apple macbook for software development, and the Swift programming language, made for software development in the Apple device community, is regarded as innovative and relatively easier to use compared to its counterparts. GarageBand, a music making app developed by Apple, is used by many musicians, professionals and amateurs alike, a testament to its usability and ease of operation. Final cut pro, another utility application recently developed by Apple, is also considered by many to be a very powerful professional video editing app for mac users.

In a nutshell, Apple is one of the largest tech companies in the world, and has reached a monumental financial milestone. The company is an early example of how giant multinational companies can emerge from almost nothing in the vibrant culture of technology prevalent in silicon valley, and there is something to be learnt by future entrepreneurs regarding the marketing techniques, innovation, and the design philosophy that contributed to it’s massive success, that has truly left its mark in the world of technology.

Ref.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-45050213

https://www.statista.com/statistics/253649/iphone-revenue-as-share-of-apples-total-revenue/