Apple: Which groups are part of the club of 1000 billion dollars in market capitalization?

(BFM Bourse) – The graphics processor manufacturer Nvidia briefly crossed the symbolic bar of 1,000 billion dollars in market capitalization this week, joining a very select club, some of which have not managed to stay at this level.

Nvidia in the big leagues. The maker of graphics processors passed the $1 trillion mark in market capitalization last Tuesday, the value of all of the company’s shares.

A growth justified by the flourishing prospects of the group in generative artificial intelligence, that of ChatGPT, because Nvidia’s products are essential to create the computing power necessary for the training and development of large conversational robots, such as ChatGPT therefore, but also Bard from Google.

Nvidia’s rise to power may only be in its infancy. Quoted by CercleFinance, Bank of America on Wednesday raised its target price to 500 euros, a potential of more than 25% compared to the current price. This even if the capitalization of the American group has fallen a little (982 billion dollars *) since Tuesday.

>> Access our exclusive graphic analyses, and enter into the confidence of the Trading Portfolio

Nvidia has thus joined a very select club, that of companies which one day broke the ceiling of 1,000 billion dollars in market valuation.

Nine companies have already crossed the bar

According to an infographic from Visual Capitalist cited by John Plassard, investment adviser at Mirabaud, this club includes Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta – the Gafam therefore – but also Aramco and Tesla. It is worth adding to this list the Chinese PetroChina. This oil giant had actually been the very first to cross the bar of 1000 billion dollars, when it was listed in 2007 on the Shanghai Stock Exchange (it was already listed in Hong Kong).

But since then, PetroChina has plunged on the stock market. In Shanghai, its price has been divided by approximately 4.5 since the end of 2007 to fall to a capitalization in dollars of just over 180 billion. “The stock has been hurt by some of China’s biggest economic policy shifts over the past decade, including the government’s abandonment of a commodity-driven development model and its attempts to crack down on speculative ‘manias’ of the kind that made PetroChina the first company in the world to generate $1 trillion [de capitalisation boursière, NDLR] in 2007”, underlined in 2017 Bloomberg. The press agency spoke at the time of “the biggest stock market collapse in history”.

Not all members of the trillion dollar “club” have (fortunately) met a fate at PetroChina. But Meta and Tesla are now quite far from this mark which they crossed in June and October 2021 respectively. interests, rolled their valuations, which are currently around $660 billion for Tesla and $700 billion for parent Facebook.

Tesla was notably penalized by the Twitter file, Elon Musk having sold Tesla shares to partially finance the acquisition of the social network. This soap opera had also exposed very harsh management methods on the part of the businessman, in turn damaging the reputation of the car manufacturer. Tesla deliveries were also somewhat disappointing last year. For Meta, the fall in the title could be explained by fears in the advertising market – with in particular changes to the iOS privacy policy which has an impact on user tracking and targeted advertising – as well as than by the market’s skepticism about its turn into the metaverse.

Five groups still in the club

There remains the current club of “1000 billion” to which only American tech groups belong, with the exception of Saudi Aramco. The Saudi giant with dizzying profits (161 billion dollars in 2022) exceeded this bar as soon as it was listed on the stock market in December 2019, and moreover broke the 2,000 billion dollars the day after its listing. Since then, the title has not experienced dizzying movements on the stock market, oscillating between 25 dollars, during the outbreak of the pandemic, and 37 dollars, during the peak of the barrel of oil in the spring of 2022.

For the other four members, Apple had been the very first American company to break the 1000 billion dollars of market capitalization, in August 2018. If Saudi Aramco beat it for the 2000 billion (which the creator of the iPhone crossed in 2020), Apple is for the moment the only company to have exceeded 3 trillion dollars, in January 2022. The apple group, which has resisted fears about the economy well in recent quarters with convincing financial results, It is not far from it, its capitalization currently standing at 2830 billion dollars.

But perhaps Apple will be joined by Microsoft ($2.47 trillion) which surpassed $1 trillion in April 2019 and 2 trillion in June 2021. The company founded by Bill Gates has recently benefited from the craze for the artificial intelligence, having invested billions of dollars in OpenAI, parent company of ChatGPT, whose technologies it integrates into its services such as the Bing search engine.

The current “club” is completed by Alphabet, the parent company of Google, and Amazon. Alphabet had also broken the ceiling of 2000 billion dollars, at the end of 2021, (the 1000 billion had been reached in January 2020). Like other tech groups, Alphabet then suffered in 2022 before recovering since the start of the year. Its capitalization currently stands at 1570 billion dollars in market capitalization.

Amazon, for its part, had crossed 1000 billion in April 2020 then approached 2000 billion without reaching it in the summer of 2021. But the e-commerce group also managed the “feat” of losing more than Petrochina. As Bloomberg then noted, the group swallowed up $1 trillion in capitalization between its July 2021 high and early November 2022, penalized by disappointing results and fears about the economy. The company has, like Alphabet, recovered from the hair of the beast since the beginning of the year, with a capitalization of 1.2 trillion dollars.

Figures stopped Friday afternoon.