[ichbinwiederda]

It is not small. It is just that other tech companies you are comparing to are relatively overvalued, because branding and speculation inflate their worth.

I like to think of it like this: if magically the whole semi-conductor industry vanished overnight the world would be much poorer. We would be in a crisis. If magically the whole of Apple vanished overnight, we'd still have smartphones and laptops and tablets and basically all the tech that Apple makes.

Just goes to show that what the market values and what is actually valuable in aggregate are not metrics that are in tune.

At the start of this century, some famous American investment bank (Citigroup ?) came up with a report that said that in the near future (today) stocks which are luxury items will grow much faster than stocks that are essentials. And that is exactly what seems to have happened. The report said this was due to increasing economic inequality. Basically the middle classes of the first world have money to spare so they buy Apple Iphones and Tesla cars. The poorer people have less money and none to spare.