Apple valuation surges to over $800 billion
By
Nick Beams
12 May 2017
Last Tuesday Apple reached a new milestone in its share market valuation when it passed $800 billion—the largest ever for any single firm.
According to the stock market, Apple is now worth more than the value of the retail firm WalMart, the engineering company General Electric, the drug firm Pfizer, and the food giant Kraft Heinz, combined.
The market expectation is that, after passing through $700 billion two years ago, Apple is well on the way toward the $1 trillion mark.
The latest elevation in Apple’s value is the product of a major boost in the first months of this year, which was kicked off with Donald Trump’s election to the US presidency last November.
Apple’s stock has risen by about one-third in 2017 and about two-thirds over the past 12 months. It has recorded an almost 50 percent hike in its market valuation in the past seven months.
The surge to a new high follows the report earlier this month that Apple’s cash holdings, mostly parked outside the United States to evade taxes, had climbed to more than a quarter of a trillion dollars, enough to buy out several major corporations.
The escalations in Apple’s market valuation and cash holdings are products of a major shift in the mode of profit accumulation across the US economy and how share values are increasingly the result of financial manipulation.
The American corporate giants of the past, firms such as General Motors, Ford and US Steel, achieved their dominance through the development of large-scale industrial processes and the employment of a large number of workers.
Over the past four decades, however, the industrial landscape has been transformed. Today, the so-called technology sector, of which Apple is part, accounts for five…