[tchalla]

> Under Cook’s leadership Apple has grown from a market capitalization of approximately $350 billion to $4 trillion, representing a more than 1,000% increase, and yearly revenue has nearly quadrupled, from $108 billion in fiscal year 2011 to more than $416 billion in fiscal year 2025.

Quite successful.

[thimabi]

I also liked the part about growing the company while reducing its carbon footprint by more than 60%.

Even if that figure might somehow be inflated, it is impressive nonetheless.

[benoau]

It's probably an even bigger reduction considering their growth.

But it's still a net deficit of nearly 15 million tons of emissions of which practically none are offset.

https://www.apple.com/environment/pdf/Apple_Environmental_Pr...

[MagicMoonlight]

Offsetting isn’t real. Buying a few trees doesn’t offset a factory full of trees that fills a river with poison.

[pertymcpert]

Carbon offsetting is nothing to do with river pollution.

[umpalumpaaa]

Carbon offsetting is risky. You plant a tree and you don’t know if it will die. You create a swampy area to absorb co2 and 10 years later it dries out due to global warming. Offsetting should be used if there is no other way to reduce emissions in the first place. Same is true for sucking carbon out of the air and storing it somewhere… it’s expensive and it should not be the default - we need offsetting and carbon segregation for the really unavoidable stuff

[reverius42]

Sucking carbon out of the air using fully renewable energy (solar/wind) is a great thing to do! ... once we've fully decarbonized all other energy use and we have extra, left-over renewable energy.

[pertymcpert]

Cool, but nothing to do with this conversation.

[pzo]

This is what’s all bad with us stocks and completely disconnected with market value: Revenue jumped 4x but market capitalization got inflated to 12x.

[rootusrootus]

Investors are forward-looking, though, so it just means that they think the future looks brighter than the immediate past.

The real disconnect IMO is TSLA.

[zarzavat]

Equities as large as Apple act as stores of value like gold, so it could just mean there's more money to be invested. You would need to compare Apple against what happened to the market in general.

[pama]

The price over earnings (arguably an imperfect, but better way to compare stock prices against each other than using pure revenue) for Apple has been fluctuating within about a factor of 2 for the last 20 years. Since before the iPhone, people were nervous about the possibility of sustained growth of profits of the company, and the P/E was similar to today. Once Apple started making a lot more money under Tim Cook, the price was at a relative discount becauee 10 years ago people were certain (but wrong) that this run would end soon and badly. The long term stability under Cook was truly impressive. Lets see what the markets think abiut the leadership change tomorrow, but probably this is not an immediate event.

[bagacrap]

pe ratio under 10 in 2013 to ~40 in 2024. You can't deny the multiple expansion.

[npunt]

To be fair, a PE <10 didn't even represent the ground truth of customer's relationship to Apple at the time. In hindsight we have a lot more information, but in that era there was still a lingering question of whether their iPhone advantage was durable, due to Android competitors. It only later became apparent that the stickiness factor was super high.

From a correct pricing perspective, of all the companies in tech Apple seems one of the most likely to keep customers for a lifetime. They have immense lock-in and customer affinity. I don't know if the correct number is 20 or 30 or 40 but unless the economy completely tanks (which tbf is reasonably possible these days), I can only imagine a majority of their customers today will still be their customers in 15-20 years.

[cesarvarela]

Some of that is debasement, but some of that is that there is no other brand like Apple.

Would you not own stock of the most valuable brand in human history?

[benoau]

It's not the brand - it's not like Apple's hit this valuation in isolation Meta, Nvidia, Google, Microsoft all enjoy similar.

It's the cash-money value of putting a fee on all digital goods and subscriptions and cash transactions in a world predisposed to forming and consolidating around monopolies. What does Apple's services revenue look like in another 20 years when Africa, China and India are paying their smartphone provider every time a dollar moves, a few billion more people paying one of two companies every time for their music, movies and tv, games, books, real-world transactions... in de-facto perpetuity.

[throwaway27448]

Most valued brand, not the most valuable.

[pembrook]

True, but also Apple is in a far more dominant position today.

Alongside Nvidia they essentially monopolize TSMCs entire latest generation chip supply.

That’s a moat in hardware that is going to get even stronger over time. Given this hardware moat they can dip their toes gently into the B2B market they’ve never really cared about and pick up another few hundred billion in high margin revenue over the next 10 years no problem.

I’ve always found it weird that Apple’s entire org runs on Mac but no other Fortune 500 company on earth does. Seems like an opportunity to nibble away at Microsoft.

[npunt]

You want to be careful about who your customers are, and what they will do to you as an organization. Enterprise customers create enterprise teams create enterprise culture creates enterprise rot. Apple is wise to play to their strategic position as a consumer product company that lives or dies on great product, because when the buyer is the user thats what they demand.

The real strategic risk for Apple is if it overly locks-in users and falls back into complacency. The discipline of having to continually win customers with better product is ultimately the only thing that will cause them to thrive long term.

[csomar]

Market cap should theoretically be determined by profit, interest rates minus liabilities (see legacy auto makers). Though it's future looking, so it might be higher or lower than a simple analyst estimation. Of course, this discount meme stocks (like TSLA) which are valued by the insanity of the crowd.

[boppo1]

Yep. QE was a monumental mistake that killed economic mobility. Asset owners vs wage earners.

[throwaway27448]

Do you think market cap should be proportional to revenue?

[IncreasePosts]

For the same period:

AMZN: +2100% META: +1700% MSFT: +1300% GOOG: +1400%

[postalcoder]

This is a specious comparison at best. Apple is, at heart, a hardware company. They have different growth profiles. A consumer hardware company getting that sort of growth is mind boggling.

[elicash]

Was meta a public company back then? Amazon, I think, was quite small, too.

[kristianp]

You're right, Facebook didn't go public until May 2012, after the start of the period mentioned. Amazon went public in '97.

[pornel]

He destroyed my trust in Apple in ways that can't be put in numbers.

This growth comes from rent seeking. Greedy fees and lock-in they can sustain due to control of the platform and cultivated duopoly.

Apple narrative around security is patronising and deceptive, used as an excuse for removing users' freedoms (by not letting users replace Apple's services with competing ones Apple protects users from their bad choices). Very conveniently the supposedly most innovative company that is great at UX can't do better than Vista.

Apple's response to pro-consumer laws was petty, vindictive, malicious compliance.

To me Apple morphed from having premium products with excellent integration to having cross-product lock-in that maximizes money extraction from users.

And then there's Cook sucking up to Trump with a golden turd to protect next quarter's revenues. This showed that Cook had no principles more important than profit.