[ianamartin]

The easy and glib way for Apple to get to a 5 trillion valuation is for the market to give them a p/e ratio like they give Amazon.

If market analysts were sane, Apple would've hit the 5 trillion mark a while ago.

But it's a stupefying number that isn't worth talking about. Apple is bad at growth. Apple is very good at profit. To them, that's all that matters, and that's not going to change.

I think we'll never see Apple valued at 5T because Apple will increase buyback programs and go totally private within 10 years. Exactly because they don't want to have to deal with people who talk about a 50 trillion valuation like it's a thing that better happen or else.

[microtherion]

> The easy and glib way for Apple to get to a 5 trillion valuation is for the market to give them a p/e ratio like they give Amazon. If market analysts were sane, Apple would've hit the 5 trillion mark a while ago.

At Amazon's P/E, Apple would be worth about $8T. But I don't think "sane analysis" and "Amazon P/E" are a good fit.

> Apple is bad at growth. Apple is very good at profit.

I've been wondering about this for a while, so I finally bothered to look up some numbers:

2004-2017, Amazon revenue grew from $6.92B to $177.87B, at 28% per year: https://www.statista.com/statistics/266282/annual-net-revenu...

During that time, Apple revenue grew from $8.2B to $222.23B, at... 29% a year: https://www.statista.com/statistics/265125/total-net-sales-o...

Obviously, these numbers are quite sensitive to starting and ending points, but to me, it looks like Apple has managed to grow at the same overall rate as Amazon, while being massively more profitable.

[ianamartin]

I totally didn't say this in my post, so perhaps it sounds a little wonky when I put it like that. Apparently, the only growth that the finance analysts care about is growth in market share. Apple has always eschewed market share in favor of profit share. The markets don't really seem to care about that.

Apple destroys almost every other company on the planet in profitability. Amazon owns the market share for online sales and makes almost zero profit. Somehow that gets a better P/E for Amazon than it does Apple.

Anyway, short version, I think people use the word growth in very specifically different ways.