On Wednesday, Apple stunned the world posting the biggest quarterly profit in corporate history of $18 billion for the three months to December. Even before that, in late November last year, the technology giant had hit a total market value of $698 billion, again the highest in history. At its peak, Apple’s market capitalisation, it turns out, is equivalent to the combined market cap of the 20 top Sensex constituents including India’s IT service providers TCS, Infosys and Wipro. This, at a time when the Indian benchmark is trading at a record high. Apple’s December quarter net earnings are also nearly one and a half times the aggregate quarterly top line of the 20 Indian IT companies that constitute the CNX IT index, Bloomberg data show. On Wednesday, a day after the company said its December quarter earnings grew 24% year-on-year to $18 billion, the Apple stock rallied 5.6% to achieve a market value of $671.6 billion. Apple reported net sales of $74.6 billion in the quarter ending December 2014. The maker of the iconic iPhone is also the biggest smartphone vendor with a record sale of 74.5 million of its phones.
