After a 30-percent overall increase in the months leading up to the iPhone release, Apple’s stock has continued to climb since last Friday. They’ve now hit their all-time high stock price, trading for as much as $132.97 on Nasdaq.
AT&T, on the other hand, closed down 1.3 percent (54 cents) and has seen a slight loss over the last few months.
So Tuesday Apple’s stock was $122, Wednesday the markets were closed, and Thursday the stock’s up to $132. Incredible. Investors have a lot of faith in Apple, not so much in AT&T. Picture the star athlete from your high school days: a true champion, a man’s man, always pulling through no matter what the odds against him. That’s Apple. Now imagine the star athlete’s dad: a washed-up insurance salesman that never really left high school, reliving his glory days vicariously through his son. That’s AT&T. Except in this scenario, the son can switch families after 5 years and has a much cooler, faster dad in Europe.
Apple shares at new high on iPhone sales prospects [Reuters]
According to Google Finance Apple (AAPL) Inc., is now trading slightly lower at 132.30 but its market cap is still higher than last week. With a market cap of $114.43 billion. Apple sometime in the last 2 years surpassed Dell ($65.90 billion) in market value and if it hopefully continues its climb will also surpass Hewlett Packard (HPQ) in market value. HP’s market cap is currently $120.42 billion and its stock is up $45.98.
Gateway is far behind Apple. Dell and HPQ as Gateway’s market cap is still in the millions. Apple could surpass HPQ next, then surpass INTEL with its market cap of $143.39 billion (which is trading lower though than Apple since Intel is at 24.68.
Apple could also surpass (if it keeps rising over time) International Business Machines (IBM)’s market cap of $161.89 billion and Google’s market cap of $168.05 billion leaving Microsoft as the only major tech company for Apple to surpass in market value. Microsoft’s market cap has been going down lately — they used to be like at $292 billion but each day are trading lower now around $285 billion or slightly higher at $286 billion but are still below their original market cap.
Unless there is another tech company that I am forgetting about that is higher than Apple but I have not named that is less than Microsoft in market value but higher than HPQ, INTEL, IBM and Google those are the only major tech companies Apple has to surpass before duking it out directly with Microsoft which also makes software for Apple’s Macintosh Operating System software which today only includes Mac OS X.