14 DAY TRIAL // Apple is close to becoming the first company worth $1 trillion, but when it comes to the Fortune 500 rankings, it’s far from securing the leading spot.
Instead, Cupertino declined one place for this year’s list, landing on the fourth position with a gross revenue of $229,234 million, well behind rival Walmart, which reached $500,343 million. Exxon Mobil and Berkshire Hathaway round up the top three.
When it comes to Apple, Fortune notes that its decline took place at a time when the company posted a 6 percent gain in annual sales.
“The Apple juggernaut continues at tremendous scale and despite the overall saturation of smartphones, which make up the vast majority of the company’s sales and profits. In an unusual move, Apple introduced three new phones, the upgraded iPhone 8 and 8 Plus, as well as the redesigned iPhone X, powered by facial-recognition technology. Services like Apple Pay and Apple Music continued to rise too,” it says.
The race to $1 trillion market cap
Amazon entered the top 10 for the first time, landing on position number 8, while long-time rival Microsoft was only 30th this year. But on the other hand, Fortune notes that the four most valuable companies on the list are all involved in the technology field, namely Apple, Alphabet, Microsoft, and Amazon.
The biggest drop this year, however, wasn’t recorded by one of these technology giants, but by Xerox, which declined 129 spots to 291. At the opposite pole, the biggest increase was posted by Nvidia, which improved its position by no less than 80 places, eventually reaching position number 306.
In the meantime, Microsoft, Apple, and Amazon are all in the race of reaching $1 trillion market cap, and this historic milestone should be touched in the next couple of years. While Apple is betting big on the iPhone lineup, Microsoft and Amazon are investing heavily in enterprise solutions.