I wrote about six months ago about how Apple was the most valuable tech company in the world. At the time Exxon was still significantly ahead and it seemed unlikely that Apple would catch them quickly.
But today it happened. With all the turmoil in the stock markets, Apple is now the most valuable company in the world, $500M ahead of Exxon when I last looked (so it could go either way in the short term).
The thing Apple seems to do better than anyone else is make profit. It has a small share of the overall mobile phone market, for example (measured by units or revenue) but it makes over 2/3 of all the profit. And I’m not talking about the smartphone market, the entire mobile handset market.
Almost everything they do has a lot of serious critics but it ha all paid off. Retail stores? So 20th century when everything is online. Design your own chips? You should outsource everything you can to experts. Enter the phone market? It’s just a handset (quote from the then CEO of Nokia)