Over the past months there has been a great deal of Apple knocking and conjecture on whether or not the company has peaked. Naysayers are suggesting that Apple cannot maintain its momentum without Steve Jobs at the helm. Despite this, as pointed out in this Statista article, Apple is still hugely profitable and manages to dwarf the results of other players in the industry.
With annual profits of $41.7bn on a revenue of $156.5bn, Apple makes more money than Microsoft, eBay, Google, Facebook, Yahoo! and Amazon combined. Together, these giants of the industry can muster only $34.4bn. At the bottom of the table the combined forces of Nokia, Samsung, htc and RIM produce a miserable £12.8bn.
After recent falls, Apple stock is now rebounding and is once again approaching $600. Yet even at these levels, Apple is surprisingly conservatively rated by financial markets. It has an extremely low price/earnings ratio of just over 13. Imagine: That’s pure, bread-and-butter bluechip territory. Amazon, on the other hand, while selling a staggering but unknown quantity of Kindle Fires at a loss, enjoys a breathtakingly optimistic P/E ratio of 454. That represents a lot of future content to be consumed on those ever-so-cheap and unprofitable tablets.
It’s a case of profit today or profit tomorrow. I know which I’d sooner have.
by Mike Evans, 26 November 2012