Apple may be big - but it's really not that huge

New York

THE iPhone keeps generating fabulous profits - and levitating share prices - for Apple. Those soaring share prices briefly pushed Apple's market value over US$900 billion last month. That was not simply another mind-boggling number. It marked a historic achievement.

After accounting for inflation, Apple became the most valuable publicly traded company of all time. Crossing the US$900 billion threshold also raised a question that has popped up periodically during Apple's flight into the stock market stratosphere: Will Apple become the first company to be worth US$1 trillion?

We cannot predict Apple's future. But with help from specialists at the University of Chicago, we can place Apple's stock market rise into historical perspective. This analysis shows that Apple's numbers are still spectacular - but they do not look quite as awesome when you take a really long-term view.

On Nov 8, Apple's closing market cap reached US$903 billion, surpassing what Microsoft was worth during the dot-com boom.

Microsoft's highest closing value, in 1999, when translated into today's dollars, was roughly US$901 billion.

Apple's value has been rising for quite some time. Earlier in this decade, Apple passed Exxon Mobil as the most valuable company in the contemporary stock market.

To put its current size in context, Apple is worth more than the entire gross domestic product of Turkey.

But Apple's dominance is not just a question of inflation. Using another metric - Apple's weight in the current stock market - IBM and AT&T, in their halcyon days, were far more dominant than Apple is today.

The University of Chicago maintains a database with virtually all companies traded publicly in the United States since December 1925.

Alexander Poukchanski, assistant director of index analytics at the Center for Research in Security Prices at the Chicago Booth School of Business, used that data to create a list of the 20 top US companies, ranked by their highest market cap, from 1925 till November.

When the numbers are not adjusted for inflation, Apple is the largest company on the list by a large margin, followed by Alphabet (the parent company of Google) and Microsoft. In the list, all three hit their high point in November.

Apple has been moving above and below its pinnacle since then, and its value was just above US$895 billion at the close of trading Wednesday.

The list is basically split between the hot markets of the last 25 years: the current one, which started in March 2009, and the stock market surge associated with the dot-com era and its aftermath.

General Electric was in fourth place overall, based on its US$594 billion market cap in August 2000. Companies such as Intel, Cisco and Oracle appear on the all-time list, too.

Intriguingly, AT&T made the list twice - once in March 2000, and a second time in July 2016. That is because the "old" AT&T went out of existence in November 2005, said the University of Chicago.

AT&T was split into many pieces. The new AT&T was formed after SBC, a regional telephone company, bought the old AT&T name.

When you adjust for inflation, the ranking changes. Another way of measuring a company's stature in the stock market is to see how big it is relative to the market as a whole. Using this metric, Apple in late 2017 does not tower over the rest of the stock market as much as many other companies did in previous eras.

In fact, although Apple's market cap is far higher today than it was five years ago, Apple shares represented a larger share of the total stock market in September 2012 than they do now.

The Apple of 2017 does not show up at all in either of the two Top 20 lists that Mr Poukchanski produced, one starting in 1980 and one going all the way back to 1925.

It may be difficult to remember but IBM had far more stock market swagger in the 1980s than Apple does today. In December 1985, IBM's shares constituted 4.4 per cent of the entire stock market, a higher percentage than any other company since 1980.

That is a very high figure, given the enormous expanse of the universe covered by the Center for Research database, which included 6,225 stocks for December 1985.

By contrast, the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index has, as you might imagine, 500 stocks; the Dow Jones industrial average has 30.

In November, Apple's shares constituted only 2.5 per cent of the overall stock market. In September 2012, they reached 3.2 per cent of the total market, far more than today.

In other words, many other stocks have become giants in the 2017 market: Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway, Facebook and more. Apple does not tower over them as much as IBM once did over its contemporaries.

With an even longer perspective, Apple's current stature diminishes further. Consider that in May 1932, AT&T constituted 13 per cent of the entire stock market - more than five times higher than Apple's proportion today. In March 1928, General Motors accounted for 8 per cent of the stock market. And in 1970, IBM accounted for 6.8 per cent of the market of that day.

One explanation for the outsize status of these companies in earlier times is that the stock market itself was much smaller: 6,715 listings in November compared with only 704 in May 1932 and 584 in March 1928. It was easier to be a big fish in those smaller ponds. NYTIMES