Anyone have a few spare slices of American cheese?
Over the weekend, at Berkshire Hathaway $BRK.B’s annual general meeting, chairman Warren Buffett reaffirmed his love for US consumer technology giant Apple $AAPL. Although not owning an iPhone himself—and avoiding investing in most tech stocks over the years—Buffett has seen the value in how the company retains customers through iterative product updates and new features that make Apple’s gadgets a necessity.
On Friday, May 4, Buffett announced his company had upped its holdings of Apple stock to 250 million shares, making it Berkshire’s largest holding. This sent Apple’s stock price skyrocketing, and the momentum has carried into this week. (It’s currently sitting at around $185 at the time of publishing, up about 5% from its closing price on Thursday of $176.)
This bump—along with the jolt Apple’s stock price received earlier last week when the company posted another massive earnings report—means that Apple is closing in on becoming the first public company to be valued at $1 trillion.
Its market capitalization is currently sitting at around $933 billion. That means it just needs to gain about $67 billion in value—which happens to be the market value of many well-known global companies. According to data pulled from Sentieo, that includes BMW, Dupont, Hermès, Twenty-First Century Fox, Time Warner, and Kraft-Heinz, all of which currently have values between $65 billion and $75 billion. That’s a lot of German sports cars and cheese slices.
The summer is a relatively quiet period for the company (although it could potentially announce a new product at its WWDC developers’ conference in June), but come autumn, the company will likely roll out its latest gadgets in time for the holiday period. By this time next year, it’s entirely possible that the $1 trillion figure is in Apple’s rear view.
That would make Apple the 17th-richest country in the world.
