Hi fellow Publish0x readers, welcome to the first article in a new series I’m doing which looks at how rich the big companies we encounter in our daily lives actually are. I’m kicking off with Apple, one of the biggest and most powerful comoanies in the world today.
No matter how you look at the company, Apple is gigantic. While the company doesn’t release its exact sales data per product, we can use the data we have to calculate approximate figures. As of March 2024 it’s estimated that Apple sells:
- 7 iPhones each second
- 1 to 2 iPads each second
- 1 to 2 Apple Watches each second
- A MacBook or iMac every 2 seconds
That’s only counting the physical devices too, Apple also makes lots of money off of products like iCloud, Apple Music, the App Store, Apple Pay, online advertising and their many other products the company sells. It adds up to a staggering amount of money over the course of a year.
According to recent SEC filings, in 2023 the company made total sales of $385 billion dollars. After paying all their operating costs, expenses and taxes the company made a profit of nearly $101 billion dollars from those sales.
Looking at the balance sheet of the company we can see that the company has spent $114.6 billion on its property, plants and equipment. This includes its hundreds of stores, office buildings, factories and all the equipment inside them that the company needs to operate normally. Of course these assets depreciate over time as they get used (especially the equipment), but that’s a staggering amount of stuff to own around the world. Apple also has huge bank accounts and investments, just the cash and money market accounts on December 31st 2023 were $73.1 billion. In total adding up everything the company owns, the company had $352.5 billion of total assets at the end of December 2023.
The question of course is what does the company do with those massive profits they are continuing to earn. Well some of that money will get set aside to pay for the development new products and technologies which will eventually be released and hopefully generate most sales and profit, but the vast majority of the money Apple makes is actually given out to the companies shareholders.
Apple has two main ways of sharing its earnings with its shareholders. It pays a cash dividend every 3 months to each shareholder, and it buys back lots of its own stock. In its 2023 financial year Apple paid out around $15 billion in dividends to shareholders and bought back $77.5 billion worth of stock. The company likes repurchasing its stock because not only does it cost less in taxes, it means that the longer somebody owns Apple stock the more they’ll share in the companies profit as there will be fewer and fewer shares to divide it between each quarter.
The huge amount of money the company gives back to shareholders has driven the stock price gradually higher and higher. The value of all the shares of stock in the company combined at the time of writing was $2.62 Trillion USD. If Apple continues to be a technology powerhouse and profit making machine, that figure looks to only grow from here.
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