Apple worth more than all euro zone banks

[Earth_First]

Source: Reuters

LONDON (Reuters) -Technology company Apple is now worth as much as the 32 biggest euro zone banks.

That's the stark result from a steep fall in the share price of banks including Spain's Santander, France's BNP Paribas, Germany's Deutsche Bank and Italy's Unicredit, compared to a steady rise in Apple's valuation, according to Thomson Reuters data.

Earlier on Friday the DJ STOXX euro zone banks index fell 4 percent, valuing its 32 members at $340 billion. That's based on the market capitalization of their free-float shares, which for some French banks in particular is less than 100 percent.

The euro zone banks have lost three-quarters of their value since peaking in May 2007.

Read more: http://m.yahoo.com/w/yfinance/article?id=http%3A%2F%2Fxml.news.yahoo.com%2Fus%2Fnews%2Frss%2Frichstoryrss.html%3Fu%3D%2Fnm%2F20110819%2Fbs_nm%2Fus_apple_worth&offset=4&backlink=%2F&.ts=1313770405&.tsrc=yahoo&.intl=US&.lang=en

[xchrom]

1. recommend

[FiveGoodMen]

2. Well, they overcharge on everything they sell and people keep buying...

[onehandle]

3. Not anymore. Competitors cannot compete with them, part to part, feature to feature.

They all use the same suppliers and factories.

Apple is overtaking and surpassing competitors on almost all fronts.

HP this week said, 'You win Apple. We quit,' in the mobility sector.

Also in study after study, Apple products not only keep more of their value, but cost much less to maintain than competitors.

[joeglow3]

4. They just do a better job of convincing people they need their products

I have not owned any (Ipod, Ipad, etc.) and get by just fine.

[banned from Kos]

6. Wish I had bought a Mac last year - still fending off viruses on Windows

but the real story here is the puny market cap of the Euro banks. Morgan ($135b) Wells ($125b) and Citi ($80b) match their 32.

Many hear don't believe it but Geithner was tougher on bank capitalization with his SCAP - made them bulk up on their own.

[Egnever]

12. Then you should upgrade to windows 7

It is much more secure and in all the recent hacker conventions its macs going down first not the windows boxes. It also will run on damn near anything xp would.

[Egnever]

13. Where do you get that idea?

Recent offering from Acer and ASUS both equal or beat the ipads handily feature for feature at a considerably lower price.

[fujiyama]

7. I agree that their products can be considered overpriced

on their technical features and specifications alone.

But Apple has become more than just another consumer good company. It's an accessory, a design show piece, and a status icon as well. Their products are also easily the most intuitive of any I've seen.

But being more of a tinkering geek myself, the only Apple product I've ever owned is an iPhone 3G. Since then I've moved on to Android, but out of the box, nothing is nearly as easy to use as an iPhone.

[Tesha]

15. In terms of TCO (Total Cost of Ownership), Apple products are often very economical.

Nowadays, even their purchase prices are a lot more
in-line with comparable mainstream (not whitebox)
hardware than they used to be; for example, the
latest MacBook Air is very competitive with other
big-name ultraportable notebooks equipped with
similar features.

Tesha

[Donnachaidh]

5. yeah, that slave labor has been good to them.

Praise for a company that has suicides attributed to their products. Huzzah! :sarcasm:

[Tesha]

16. Where were HP's computers built? (NT)

[Odin2005]

8. Marketing overpriced shit to hipsters is ALWAYS profitable.

[christx30]

9. To be fair...

Apple is probably a better run company than those European banks. From the top down I would rather have Steve Jobs as my boss than the bankers. Jobs and his companies have to sit down and design a product that people want. And even though I would never buy an apple product myself, I gotta say they have done very well in that regard.
The bankers, on the other hand, do not know how to do anything but fail, tell their customers that they should be grateful for that failure, and get paid millions to do it.

[Cool Logic]

10. Thus, we have been provided yet another real life petri dish of economic analysis...

that reinforces the pre-eminence of Capitalism.

[Egnever]

11. They are also repeating the same mistake they made in the past

When they originally lost to microsoft. They are walling themselves off from the world and I thin k they will fall just as hard or harder. Android now claims 50% of the mobile phone market with thousands of new devices going online daily.

It will be interesting to watch how it plays out but Google of today is the same as microsoft of the 80's and 90's. They are not holding onto their OS with an iron fist they are encouraging innovation by allowing everyone to use it. Short term Apple may appear to have won but the explosive growth of android points to a long term disaster for apple.

You would think jobs learned something the last time around but most of the moves they are making lately seem to indicate he did not.

[Tesha]

14. You seem to think Apple has to be the majority player in order to be successful.

This has never been true.

But Apple does have a tendency to be *THE MOST
PROFITABLE PLAYER* in a market; right now, with just
their iPhone 4 and a few remaining iPhone 3GSs, they
are vacuuming-up more than 2/3 of the profit being
made in the *ENTIRE* mobile phone business even as
Android phones outsell iPhones.

In a market, it's almost always better to be in Porsche's
position in than Chevy's.

Tesha