Apple is officially the first publicly traded US company to reach the $1 trillion record valuation. The tech company crossed the threshold on August 2 when the stock hit $207.04 per share. Before this, stock analysts and investors were only looking at a share price of $203.45.
Apple is now up more than 20 percent for 2018. The stock climbed to an almost 3 percent after the company announced an impressive third-quarter earnings report on July 31.
The company can look forward to more milestones crossed as Wall Street is estimating the Apple shares even to go higher than $207 a share. Some analysts are in fact giving their price target estimates of as much as $212.79 per share. This can translate to a market cap of $1.046 trillion according to Business Insider.
In the minutes leading up to the milestone, there had been reports that Apple's Stocks app had just mistakenly declared that Apple had crossed the critical threshold. A technical difficulty had reportedly caused the apps to miscalculate the numbers. During the brief time of confusion, Siri said Apple's valuation is already at $1.011 trillion at the time.
On the $1 trillion race against Apple is Amazon, Microsoft, and Google Alphabet. Amazon is currently at a market cap of about $872.5 billion as of August 2.
There had been companies on a worldwide level to reach the $1 trillion valuations. PetroChina crossed the mark in November 2007 but did not last for a day. At present, the Chinese oil firm is valued at less than $500 billion. It got even smaller than Alibaba. There had been reports that Saudi Aramco is eyeing a valuation of $2 trillion but no current updates on this yet.
The milestone reached on Wednesday followed strong financial results for Apple's fiscal 2018 third quarter that ended on June 30 and officially announced on July 31. The company posted quarterly revenue of $53.3 billion, an increase of 17 percent from the year-ago quarter. It also posted quarterly earnings per diluted share of $2.34, up 40 percent. Global sales propelled quarter's revenue to as much as 60 percent.
"We're thrilled to report Apple's best June quarter ever, and our fourth consecutive quarter of double-digit revenue growth," Tim Cook, Apple's CEO, said in a statement. He added that the results were driven by consistent strong sales of iPhone, and wearables. He said there are new products in the pipeline.
"Our strong business performance drove revenue growth in each of our geographic segments, net income of $11.5 billion, and operating cash flow of $14.5 billion," Luca Maestri, Apple's CFO, said in his remarks.
"We returned almost $25 billion to investors through our capital return program during the quarter, including $20 billion in share repurchases," he proudly shared.
