Apple, Google locked in battle for supremacy

San Francisco

AT THE top of the corporate world, Apple and Google are in a back-and-forth battle to be number one.

It's not clear which of the two Silicon Valley giants will emerge on top in a contest which highlights the contrast of very different business models.

For a brief time early this year, Google parent Alphabet overtook Apple as the world's largest company by market value. Apple then regained, lost and recovered the leader position in May in a battle that appears set to continue for some time. At the close last Friday, Apple was worth some US$522 billion, to US$496 billion for Alphabet.

The two companies have both been hugely profitable in recent years, for different reasons.

Apple has delivered a line of must-have iPhones and other gadgets that have set trends around the world but now "appears to be a little bit immobile", says Roger Kay, analyst at Endpoint Technologies A…