One of the biggest financial stories yesterday revolved around tech giant, Apple. The company dominated the news cycle as their market value approached one trillion dollars. In order to reach the mark, their stock needed to gain just one more percentage point. Skip ahead to today, where Apple stock increased by 3%, ending the day at a data value of $207.39. The gain of greater than one percent put Apple at the $1 trillion mark, making it the first company to do so in the United States and the first in the world since 2007.
The mark was hit when the price of one Apple share surpassed $207.04. At one point during day trading Thursday, prices reached $208.38, an all-time high for the stock. In large part, the significant increase in share price can be attributed to the healthy outlook released by the company on Wednesday. In large part, the uptick in sales and the boom in profits can be attributed to international markets. In recent months, the iPhone 8 and iPhone X has seen increased sales in the Chinese and Japanese market. Also contributing to the healthy outlook, and hike to $1 trillion, is the increase in revenue from the App Store.
While it may be unfortunate for Amazon, Microsoft, and Alphabet to not be the first companies in the United States to hit that mark, they have all hit record highs of their own. In trading on Thursday, all three stocks rallied to near-record highs and led the NASDAQ to end for the day up one-and-a-quarter percent. In large part, Apple is benefiting from the excitement surrounding these three stocks and the technology market as a whole.
Currently, Amazon is now worth nearly $900 billion with Google and Microsoft lurking just slightly behind at $800 billion. The race for the second company to reach the trillion-dollar mark will certainly be a close one. Projections for these three companies have them hitting the one-trillion-dollar mark by sometime in 2019. On the other hand, some bold price targets for Apple see the company ending 2019 with a market value of nearly $1.3 trillion.
