If Apple Were A Country Its Cash Reserves Alone Would Make It Richer Than Malaysia
Steve Jobs must be smiling from heaven!
By Sadho Ram — 31 Jan 2015, 06:04 PM — Updated almost 10 years ago
If you thought Apple Inc. was a big company, what happened on 28 January, made the behemoth even bigger. Steve Jobs's company managed a record USD74.6 billion in revenues between October and December 2014. That's not just a record for Apple. That's the biggest quarter any company has had in history.
Apple reported a net profit of $18bn (£11.8bn) in its fiscal first quarter, which tops the $15.9bn made by ExxonMobil in the second quarter of 2012, according to Standard and Poor's.
Record sales of iPhones were behind the surge in profits. Apple sold 74.5 million iPhones in the three months to 27 December - well ahead of most analysts' expectations. Apple's revenue grew to $74.6bn in the final quarter of 2014 - a 30% increase from a year earlier.
Apple now holds the record for the biggest quarter in history: USD18.04 billion in profit. For reference, that means Apple makes around USD8.3 million dollars per hour in profit (24 hours a day).
Apple now has USD178 billion in cash. So what if Apple wanted to do something really bold with all that money?Here's a list of companies Apple could buy and still have USD20 billion left over.
At their current valuations, Apple could even buy all of Uber, Tesla, Twitter, Netflix, Dropbox, Snapchat, Airbnb and SpaceX, and still have $20 billion left over, Extreme Networks chief marketing officer Vala Afshar pointed out in a tweet last night.
Some of its biggest competitors still remain out of reach. Google, for example, is worth $352 billion and Facebook is worth $211 billion. (Apple itself is valued at $635 billion.)
But Apple probably doesn’t want to buy those companies, anyway. It has been mostly quiet about putting its cash to work.
Apple has enough, in theory, to buy 480 or so of the companies in the Standard & Poor's 500. Or Lithuania, three times over.
Lithuania is a country in Northern Europe.
And according to the US Trust, Apple has more cash in reserve than Indonesia, France. And even more than Malaysia.
