Apple and Google
There was a fair bit of frothing on the web last week when Apple's market cap briefly overtook Google's. This was taken as indicative of the contrasting fortunes of the two companies these days, but Apple's share price has been at a pretty healthy level for a while now.
The most remarkable comparison for us is with HP and Dell. Apple's market cap at the end of last week was $155.68 billion, whereas HP's was $112.43 billion and Dell's was $50.64. So the combined value of the two biggest PC makers in the world is only just more than that of Apple.
Not all of this is down to things like the iPod, iTunes or iEverythingelse. The thing PC makers envy most about Apple is its ability to sell PCs at margins they can only dream about. On top of the debatable technical merits of owning a Mac over a PC, the secret to all this is style. Apple stuff is viewed, not least by itself, as cool and people are willing to pay for cool.
For this reason we can expect to see a lot more "cool" products coming out of companies like HP and Dell as they try to get out of the quagmire of commoditisation the PC industry finds itself in.
There were no other big movers last week, as markets didn't show too much change on the whole. However the picture still looked healthy for the tech sector, with the majority of companies posting gains.
| Company | Listing | Share Price 25/7/08 | Share Price 1/8/08 | Share Price 8/8/08 | Share Price 15/8/08 | 7-day change | Market cap (bn) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| AMD | AMD | 4.36 | 4.28 | 5.13 | 5.64 | 9.9% | 3.42 |
| Apple | AAPL | 162.12 | 156.66 | 169.55 | 175.74 | 3.7% | 155.68 |
| Avnet | AVT | 27.38 | 26.82 | 30.46 | 31.00 | 1.8% | 4.66 |
| Dell | DELL | 23.47 | 24.41 | 25.00 | 25.06 | 0.2% | 50.64 |
| GOOG | 491.98 | 467.86 | 495.01 | 510.15 | 3.1% | 160.41 | |
| HP | HPQ | 43.71 | 43.96 | 45.82 | 45.59 | -0.5% | 112.43 |
| IBM | IBM | 128.53 | 126.64 | 128.81 | 126.36 | -1.9% | 171.18 |
| Ingram Micro |
IM | 18.16 | 18.59 | 19.60 | 19.95 | 1.8% | 3.31 |
| Intel | INTC | 22.01 | 22.35 | 24.23 | 24.26 | 0.1% | 136.40 |
| Microsoft | MSFT | 26.16 | 25.44 | 28.13 | 27.81 | -1.1% | 253.91 |
| NVIDIA | NVDA | 11.56 | 10.84 | 11.00 | 12.96 | 17.8% | 7.19 |
| Tech Data |
TECD | 34.66 | 34.84 | 35.75 | 35.24 | -1.4% | 1.86 |
| Yahoo! |
YHOO | 21.13 | 19.80 | 19.90 | 20.44 | 2.7% | 28.36 |
| Dow | .DJI | 11370.69 | 11326.32 | 11734.32 | 11659.90 | -0.6% | NA |
| NASDAQ | .IXIC | 2310.53 | 2310.96 | 2414.10 | 2452.52 | 1.6% | NA |
| FTSE 100 | .FTSE | 5376.40 | 5352.60 | 5354.70 | 5454.80 | 1.9% | NA |
