This is a guest post from TallahasseeScene’s Noah Gomez.
If the free market is a boxing ring, then Apple is Muhammad Ali.
“There’s not a man alive who can whoop me,” Ali, the famous heavy-weight, once said. “I’m too fast. I’m too smart. I’m too pretty. I should be a postage stamp. That’s the only way I’ll ever get licked.”
When it comes to ruling the marketplace, Apple is just as powerful. It’s the tech heavyweight, stinging like a bee and floating like a butterfly, way above its competitors.
Via: Deadline
This past December, Kantar Worldpanel ComTech research reported that Apple’s cellular devices accounted for 47.7 percent of smartphone sales in the United States alone, led by the emerging iPhone 6. Android’s Galaxy S5 was a runner-up, by the smallest margin of 0.1 percent.
But how exactly does Apple keep dominating the market if the sales are so close? Carolina Milanesi, chief of research at Kantar Worldpanel ComTech, explains.
“With a range of devices available at different price points in both contract and pre-pay, Apple was able to take advantage of a weaker Android offering at the premium end of the market,” Milanesi said.
In other words, where Apple doesn’t dominate in perceived product quality, which doesn’t happen often, it makes up for in marketing techniques.
In terms of company value, there’s a simple way to assess Apple: They own half of the market. How do we know this? There are market indexes used to assess the overall stock trend, which are exemplified in both Dow Jones and NASDAQ. They work on basic averaging principles.
Via: Goodwill Coordinators
But like any set of data, the indexes require a reasonable, concentrated set of data to create accurate assessments of overall market directions. For example, you wouldn’t say that in a class of 20 “A” students and one “F” student that the “F” student accurately represents any trend in the class. He or she is an outlier.
Well, Apple is also an outlier, but instead of being an “F” among the “As,” the company is an “A” among the “Cs.”
Apple’s market value worth is $598 billion – more than $100 billion more valuable than its runner-up, Google, which is valued at $364 billion.
But what does a company whose stock value far exceeds the majority cluster do? They do what they have to: split the stock, which happened in June 2014. Splitting makes individual stocks more tradable. Oh yeah, and they knock out other competitors from the market indicators.
For example, Apple knocked out AT&T from the Dow Jones Index because it had effectively monopolized cellular communication information with the reemerging, market-dominant iPhone.
“There’s irony in that they are replacing AT&T, which helped them lift off to begin with,” said Neil Azous, founder of the Stamford, Connecticut-based advisory firm Rareview Macro.
Via: News.com.au
However, some market analysts fear for Apple’s future after joining Dow Jones, recognizing that Microsoft and Intel, who joined the index in 1999, suffered dramatic market devaluation after doing so. Apple is scheduled to join the index on March 18, 2015.
Apple is the indisputable capitalistic leader of the 21st century, so good that they had to essentially dumb down its stock in order to keep it congruent with the rest of the market.
We can’t know what Apple will do next, but it’ll definitely be bigger than expected.
Featured photo courtesy of: Value Walk
