Apple Market Cap Up $30 Billion in Q1

By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Jan 13, 11:14AM EST · Published Apr 2, 10:05AM EDT

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Apple Market Cap Up $30 Billion in Q1 — © courtesy of Apple Inc.

After taking a beating much of the past year, Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL) added $30 billion to its market cap in the first quarter of this year as its performance handily outstripped the Nasdaq. All the improvement came after Apple launched the iPhone SE.

The increase in Apple’s market cap was modest, up nearly 5%, compared to a Nasdaq performance just short of 2%. However, with a current market cap of $610 billion, the quarter’s improvement translates to $30 billion.

The argument for the new product put forward by Apple is as follows:

Welcome to iPhone SE, the most powerful 4‑inch phone ever. To create it, we started with a beloved design, then reinvented it from the inside out. The A9 is the same advanced chip used in iPhone 6s. The 12‑megapixel camera captures incredible photos and 4K videos. And Live Photos bring your images to life. The result is an iPhone that looks small. But lives large.

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The iPhone SE appears to have quieted critics who believed that consumers would wait for the iPhone 7 launch in the fall, as the iPhone 6 family has started to age. Analysts expect iPhone 6 sales for the most recent quarter to be 50 million, which is well shy of the nearly 75 million that Apple sold in the quarter that ended December 26.

In many ways, the iPhone SE is a Hail Mary. It moves Apple out of the ultra-high-end smartphone market. The base product is for sale for $399 on the Apple site. The iPhone 6s Plus has a price of $749. Apple’s brand may be damaged by moving down market.

The two events that could swing Apple’s share price up or down in the next six months are the launch of the iPhone 7 and the iPhone 6 and iPhone SE sales in the next quarter.

About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.