Alphabet Inc on Thursday hit a milestone as a rally in its shares took it above a US$1 trillion valuation for the first time, solidifying the dominance of technology and Internet shares as the biggest titans of Wall Street.
The shares rallied in the last half an hour of trading to close at US$1,450.16, up 0.8 percent on the day.
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With the gain, Alphabet became the newest member of an elite club to trade with a 13-digit market capitalization. Only two other US companies are past that threshold: Apple Inc, valued at about US$1.38 trillion, and Microsoft Corp, at US$1.27 trillion.
Globally, the list is topped by Saudi Aramco, Saudi Arabia’s national oil company, which went public last month and has a market capitalization of about US$1.8 trillion.
Amazon.com Inc flirted with the level last year, but shares in the e-commerce company would have to rise more than 7 percent for its valuation of US$931.1 billion to return above US$1 trillion.
The four companies are by far the largest on Wall Street and that gives them an outsized impact on overall market direction. Together, they represent more than 15 percent of the S&P 500.
The rest of the market is, at best, hundreds of billions of US dollars away from their valuations.
The fifth-largest US company by market capitalization, Facebook Inc, has a valuation of US$632.9 billion. The biggest company outside the technology or Internet sectors is Berkshire Hathaway Inc in sixth place, valued at about US$559 billion.
Alphabet’s move above the level is just the latest step higher for the Google parent company. Its shares are up about 40 percent from a low in June Last year, with the rally largely fueled by optimism over its prospects this year, particularly with respect to ad revenue.
Alphabet is to report its fourth-quarter results for last year on Feb. 3.
LOFTY GOALS
Evercore ISI has raised its price target for the shares to US$1,600 from US$1,350, saying that it expects the company to continue “to compound on its defensible dominance in search and video advertising with YouTube.”
Earlier this week, Deutsche Bank raised its own target to a Wall Street-high of US$1,735, saying that the shares trade “too cheaply.”
The bank cited more ad product launches, an expanded share buyback program and “improving competitiveness in the cloud business.”
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],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
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