When it comes to predictions for 2018, most financial analysts agree on one thing: one tech firm is likely to become America’s first ever trillion dollar company. The question is: which one will it be?
On Thursday, we’ll get a big clue as to who might hit that incredible milestone first, as the three biggest tech giants in the US release their latest results.
Could it be Apple?
That largely depends on its latest and supposedly greatest smartphone, the iPhone X.
If sales are strong - and they’ll need to be very strong - Apple’s value will hurtle towards a trillion dollars in no time at all.
With a higher price tag - $999 - the iPhone X wouldn’t need to break sales records in order to draw record profits, and convince investors Apple still has the ability to bring innovation to its biggest product line by far. But there have been reports lately that suggested Apple could cut its production targets for the device by almost half. That’s not what investors wanted to hear.
Still, even if iPhone X sales are modest, the company is still expected to report revenue growth of more than 10%. That would put it nicely on track to hit a market value of $1tn by the end of the year.
But Amazon might get there first.
Chief executive Jeff Bezos is now comfortably the world’s richest man. The share price of his company rose by more than 50% in 2017. Most of that was fuelled by big growth in its cloud business - Amazon Web Services. But the company now also has Whole Foods in its portfolio. There is talk of “increased synergy opportunities” here - the overlap of Amazon tech and Whole Foods physical locations could be extremely lucrative. BBC News
0 comments: