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It’s perhaps a meaningless milestone, but humans love big, round numbers. And when Apple’s share price hit $207.05 today, it became the first U.S. public company to reach a $1 trillion market capitalization.
Not bad for a company that was on the verge of insolvency when its late founder Steve Jobs came back to rescue it in the late 1990s, launching a series of products — the iMac, iPhone and iPad — that changed the company and the world.
Here’s a chart of Apple’s all-time market value:
More recently under CEO Tim Cook, Apple’s stock price has risen as the company has bought back billions of dollars worth of shares. (More than 60 percent of Apple’s market-cap growth has happened since Cook became CEO in 2011.)
But its business is also bigger than ever. Over the past 12 months, Apple generated $255 billion of revenue and $56 billion in profits. It has also reported six quarters in a row of accelerating sales growth, led recently by the iPhone X, its fast-growing Services business, including the App Store and Apple Music, and its wearables category, which includes the Apple Watch and AirPods.
Can it reach $2 trillion?
That will be tricky, as the smartphone market and the iPhone business — which has driven most of Apple’s growth over the past decade — has matured. Apple will need to identify and lead one of the next major paradigms of computing — augmented reality glasses? — and figure out a business model nearly as good as the iPhone’s. Good luck!
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
