Apple bites into history, is first US firm to reach $2 trillion in market cap – Times of India

It took Apple 42 years to reach $1 trillion in value. It took it just two more years to get to $2 trillion.
Even more stunning: All of Apple’s second $1 trillion came in the past 21 weeks, while the global economy shrank faster than ever before in the coronavirus pandemic.

On Wednesday, Apple became the first US company to hit a $2 trillion valuation when its shares climbed 1.2% to $467.8 in morning trading. It was another milestone for the maker of iPhones, Mac computers and Apple Watches, cementing its title as the world’s most valuable public company and punctuating how Covid-19 has been a bonanza for the tech giants.
Apple is the second publicly traded company to hit $2 trillion. Saudi Aramco, Saudi Arabia’s state-owned oil company, went public in December and briefly exceeded the $2 trillion mark. It remained the world’s most valuable company until Apple surpassed it last month.
Apple’s rapid rise to $2 trillion is particularly astonishing because the company has not done much new in the past two years. It has simply built one of the tech industry’s most effective moneymakers, which has such a firm grip over how people communicate, entertain themselves and shop that it no longer relies on groundbreaking inventions to keep the business humming.
Under its chief executive, Tim Cook, Apple’s most important innovation in recent years has arguably been its nearly unrivalled ability to generate profits. Cook has built a sophisticated global supply chain to produce billions of devices — most assembled in China — and leaned into a product line designed to lock customers into its ecosystem so they buy new gadgets every few years and pay monthly fees to use Apple’s suite of digital services.
Apple has also grown despite its size by extracting more money from the companies that run businesses on iPhone apps, drawing accusations that its 30% cut of some app revenues is unfair.
The Silicon Valley company’s business has been only further entrenched by Covid-19, which has forced people to work, learn and socialise virtually. From April through June, even as Apple shuttered many of its retail stores because of the virus, it posted $11.25 billion in profits, up 12% from a year ago. It increased its sales of every product and in every part of the world.
Apple has also wielded another powerful tool to boost its valuation and enrich its investors and executives: stock buybacks. Since the company’s value hit $1 trillion, it has returned $175.6 billion to shareholders, including $141 billion in stock buybacks. Apple has repurchased more than $360 billion of its own shares since 2012, by far the most of any company, and has announced plans to spend at least tens of billions of dollars more on Apple stock.