Apple Inc. shares briefly hit the price level needed to become the first U.S. company to reach a $1 trillion market capitalization Thursday.
Apple AAPL, +2.62% shares reached a high price of $207.05 in intraday trading Thursday, the price needed for Apple to officially hit the trillion-dollar mark, based on its most up-to-date share count of 4.83 billion as of July 20. The current market-cap calculations assume that Apple’s share count hasn’t budged since mid-July, though that’s unlikely given the company’s rapid pace of share buybacks.
Over a seven-second span, from 11:48:04 a.m. ET to 11:48:11, 49 trades for total volume of nearly 6,100 shares went through at $207.05, according to FactSet time-and-sales data.
The company won’t officially be anointed the first trillion-dollar company until the stock closes at or above $207.05. At that price, multiplied by 4,829,926,000 shares outstanding, would give Apple a market cap of $1.002 trillion.
Shares have pared some gains to be up 2.7% at $206.87.
The stock’s strong performance this week comes after Apple reported better-than-expected results for its fiscal third quarter on Tuesday. The company also delivered an upbeat forecast for its September quarter, when it typically releases new iPhones.
Opinion: Why a trillion-dollar Apple market cap is nothing to celebrate
After Amazon.com Inc. AMZN, +1.40% reported earnings last week and saw its stock jump, some thought the company would beat Apple to the trillion-dollar punch. Amazon’s market capitalization sat at roughly $873 billion Thursday, ahead of Alphabet Inc. GOOGL, +0.49% GOOG, +0.44% with an $849 million market cap and Microsoft Corp.’s MSFT, +1.28% $818 billion.
Apple won’t technically be the first company to reach $1 trillion, as PetroChina earned that honor on the Chinese market more than a decade ago. The company’s valuation has come down sharply in the years since.
And Saudi Aramco, the state-owned Saudi Arabia-based oil giant, which reportedly intends to go public in 2019, was recently estimated to be valued at about $2 trillion, according to the Financial Times.
Shares of Apple are up 31% over the past 12 months. The Dow Jones Industrial Average DJIA, -0.12% of which Apple is a component, has gained 15% over that time.
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