Apple achieves $2 trillion market capitalization despite COVID-19

Apple on Wednesday became the first U.S. company to reach a market value of $2 trillion, a milestone that the world's largest firm has taken just two years to achieve, boosted in the last five months by the COVID-19 pandemic. The apple firm, created in 1976 by Steve Jobs and led since 2011 by Tim Cook, is the second in history to reach such stock market magnitude, behind the Saudi state oil company Saudi Aramco, which has regressed in recent months to give the credit for being the most valuable to Apple at the end of July.

Apple reached the billion dollar mark for the first time on August 2, 2018, overtaking large technological rivals like Amazon, Alphabet (Google's parent company) and Microsoft, and now history is repeating itself in the midst of a pandemic, which more than an obstacle seems to have been an accelerator. It took 38 years to surpass that first billion dollars and, from there, only two to double it, a growth speed that analysts pointed out especially after last March 23, among the massive sales due to the coronavirus crisis, the technology came to fall out of the billion due to the fear of how their businesses would be affected.

But, unlike many other companies, Apple is resisting the COVID-19 and has even come out of the confinement phase in the U.S. and Europe stronger, since in the first half of 2020 it increased its net profit by 4%, to $22.5 billion, with a 6% improvement in sales, which brought it in $118 billion. The last quarter, between May and July, was a record one and its star product, the iPhone, was overshadowed by the turnover of Mac computers, which have become a key part of the transition to teleworking, with a year-on-year increase of 22%, and services such as the App Store or Apple TV, which grew by 15% due to the need to interact online.

It had growth in all its geographical areas, despite being forced to temporarily close stores around the world and even to close them again due to increases in cases, especially in the United States, as well as supply chain problems due to the halt in activity in China, where it manufactures most of its products.

Apple's stock market value has risen by around 60% since the beginning of the year and if you count twelve months from now, the increase is 120%, which according to some analysts highlights Cook's management and its contribution to the change in perception of the company from a hardware developer to a software provider. In this regard, analysts stress that investors are now willing to invest more in Apple despite the challenges it faces in the short term, including the legal battle that the video game developer Epic has posed around the policies of its virtual store and the launch of a new iPhone with 5G capacity in the midst of a recession. The company scored the two billion dollar milestone shortly before 11:00 a.m. by reaching $467.77 per share on the New York Stock Exchange, but at the close of Wall Street failed to consolidate that progress and closed with a price of $463.43.