Apple: Near-bankruptcy to most valuable company
BB will soon be higher than it once was Aug 09, 2011 | Vote 0 0 Apple: Near-bankruptcy to most valuable company Pedestrians walk by an Apple Store in San Francisco. Apple has become the world's most valuable company, surpassing Exxon Mobil. Apple Justin Sullivan/Getty Images Pedestrians walk by an Apple Store in San Francisco. Apple has become the world's most valuable company, surpassing Exxon Mobil. Hamilton Spectator SAN FRANCISCO Apple Inc., a company that was on the brink of bankruptcy before Steve Jobs returned as chief executive officer in 1997, passed Exxon Mobil Tuesday to become the most valuable business in the world. Apple’s ascension caps a 14-year transformation from a personal-computer also-ran into a seller of everything from smartphones to digital music. Apple has already eclipsed Microsoft, IBM and Intel, whose dominance of the technology industry in the 1990s helped nudge Apple to the fringes of the PC market. “The Apple of today is different from the Apple of even a few years ago,” Shaw Wu, an analyst at Stern Agee & Leach, said. “People who buy Apple tend to buy big and get your friends and family to do it as well. There’s nothing else like that.” Apple may as much as double computer sales over the next few years, while the iPhone business may triple, Wu said. If successful, Apple’s new iCloud music and information-storage service may help the company add millions of new users. Jobs, who co-founded Apple at the age of 21, was ousted by the board in 1985. When he returned to the company 12 years later, it had run up $1.86 billion US in losses over two years. Apple was 90 days away from bankruptcy, Jobs would later say. He engineered the company’s comeback by honing Apple’s industrial design, tightly integrating software with hardware, and pushing into new markets, such as phones, music and tablets. The stock price gives Cupertino, Calif.-based Apple a market capitalization of about $340 billion, topping the $338 billion value of Irving, Texas-based Exxon. Apple’s shares are up from an adjusted $5.48 on Sept. 16, 1997, the day Jobs returned to the company. The iPhone, introduced in 2007, has become Apple’s best-selling product and turned the company into the world’s biggest smartphone maker. After winning customers away from Research In Motion Ltd. and Nokia, Apple is now sparring with Google for leadership in the market for mobile-phone software. Apple’s profit more than doubled last quarter to $7.31 billion on revenue of $28.6 billion. The company had record sales of iPhones and iPads — products that didn’t exist five years ago and now account for about two-thirds of sales. Apple has accumulated $76.2 billion in cash and other holdings. Exxon has tumbled since trading in July at more than $85 a share, as oil futures in New York have dropped. Crude fell as low as $75.71 a barrel Tuesday, the lowest price since Sept. 29 on an intraday basis. Bloomberg News