The size of Apple and its cash in relative terms

By: Hugo McDougall in Uncategorized on Feb. 5, 2012

After last week’s earnings releases, everyone’s eyes were on Apple as it crushed analysts’ estimates with its Q1 earnings. Since Apple’s market value is now beyond the 400 billion USD, let’s look at what the company is worth in relative terms.

  • Apple’s total market value is about the same as Norway’s GDP in 2010 (413bn USD)  and is significantly larger than Denmark’s GDP (2010: 310bn USD)
  • Being Icelandic I also find it interesting that Apple’s market value is roughly 32x larger than the 2010 GDP of my home country (12.5bn USD).
  • For the price of 400bn USD one could also pick one of the following large countries and pay down their total external debt; Russia, Brazil, Turkey, India and more.

In Q1, Apple reported 97.6bn USD cash balance, determined by cash & cash equivalents. Don’t take this as a speculation about potential acquisitions, but more as a “fun fact”: Apple could buy one of the following companies and still have some cash left in its pockets:

  • Citigroup Inc – Market value of 90.1bn USD
  • Amazon.com Inc – Market value of 88.8bn USD
  • Bank of America – Market value of 73.9bn USD
  • The Walt Disney Company – Market value of 70.5bn USD
  • Goldman Sachs – Market Value of 55bn USD
  • Boeing Co. – Market Value of 55bn USD
  • … and the list could be longer.

Additional “fun facts” The United States uses roughly 19.2 million barrels of oil pr. day – so, with 97.6bn USD in cash, Apple could afford paying the entire US oil consumption for roughly 50 days and the world’s consumption for roughly 9 days (using a little more than 100 million barrels pr. day). And Apple could buy roughly 35bn kilograms of red apples from a grocery store in the US. And for the price of a banana (assuming 0.36 USD pr. piece), Apple could buy approximately 270bn bananas. Consensus As Apple is the now the largest company in the world by market cap, holding roughly 23% of its market value in cash, it is among analysts’ most favored stocks. Analysts are quite bullish on Apple’s future, with an average consensus target price of 575.25 USD per share, which has been revised upwards by 12.6 percent in the last week (table 1). Should that come to reality, the market value of Apple could exceed the total 2010 GDP of Switzerland (528bn USD).

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