Apple Inc shares rose to a record on Wednesday after quarterly profit more than doubled as holiday demand for the iPhone and iPad cemented its position as the most valuable technology company.
Apple’s stock gained 6.2 percent to US$446.66 after reporting blockbuster results on Tuesday. Apple’s increase, the company’s biggest one-day rise since May 2010, made it the day’s best performer in the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index.
Apple briefly surpassed ExxonMobil as the most valuable US company after an excellent quarter, though the oil company has regained the lead at the market’s close.
ExxonMobil closed up US$0.04 at US$87.22 for a market capitalization of US$418 billion, while Apple ended the day with a market cap of about US$415 billion.
Apple first surpassed ExxonMobil in market value in August last year and the two companies have been jockeying back and forth since then.
Apple dethroned US software giant Microsoft in May 2010 to become the largest US technology company in terms of market cap.
Apple stock has risen steadily over the past few years on the release of a string of hit products starting with the iPod in 2001, followed by the iPhone in 2007 and the iPad in 2010.
Apple reported record earnings on Tuesday, driven by strong sales of the iPhone 4S, which was released a day before the Oct. 5 death of Apple’s visionary founder Steve Jobs.
Apple’s net profit more than doubled in the first quarter of fiscal 2012 to a record US$13.06 billion, while revenue soared to an all-time high of US$46.33 billion from US$26.74 billion a year ago.
Summing up the general sentiment, investment bank RBC Capital Markets spoke of “iDomination.”
Apple said it sold 37.04 million iPhones in the quarter ending Dec. 31, up 128 percent from a year ago, and 15.43 million iPads, up 111 percent.
Apple sold 5.2 million Macintosh computers in the quarter, up 26 percent, and 15.4 million iPods, down 21 percent from a year ago.
Apple also said it ended the quarter with a cash pile of US$97.6 billion, prompting Canaccord Genuity technology analyst Michael Walkley to speculate that the company might declare a dividend.
“We believe Apple is likely to announce a dividend during 2012, potentially next quarter when crossing US$100 billion in cash and cash equivalents,” Walkley said.
“We believe Apple is well-positioned for very strong 2012-13 sales and earnings growth driven by new product introductions, including the pending refresh of MacBook Air, the iPad 3 launching this spring, an LTE iPhone likely in the third quarter of 2012 and potentially Apple TV exiting 2012,” he added.
Walkley also raised his price target for Apple shares to US$650 from US$560.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained