The market capitalization of five U.S. technology giants rose from $4.1 trillion to $6.4 trillion in the 12 months between June 2019 and July 2020. Four of the five now have market caps above $1 trillion.
Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL | AAPL Price Prediction), the most valuable company in the world, has a current market cap of $1.68 trillion, according to data compiled by ForexSchoolOnline. A year ago, the company’s value was $913 billion, trailing Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN), with a value of $936 billion, and Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ: MSFT), which had a market cap of $1.04 billion.
Currently, Microsoft’s market cap of $1.54 trillion puts the company in second place behind Apple and ahead of third-place Amazon’s market cap of $1.48 trillion.
Apple’s market cap jumped by 84% in the 12-month period, while Amazon’s value jumped by 57% and Microsoft’s rose by 49%.
The fourth-largest tech firm is Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOGL) with a market cap of $1.04 trillion, up 36% in 12 months, and Facebook Inc. (NASDAQ: FB) ranks fifth with a market cap of $690 billion, up by 26% in a year.
Since March of 2006, Apple’s market cap has grown from $53.4 billion, an increase of more than 30 times. Microsoft’s market cap has jumped by almost 5.5 times, and Amazon’s market cap has soared by 97 times from $15.2 billion. The total value of all five stocks in 2006 was $465.4 billion.
As of midday Tuesday, the 71 stocks that comprise the S&P 500 information technology sector have jumped by nearly 62% in the past 12 months. Apple and Microsoft are the only representatives of the top five in the sector.
According to data from Fidelity, the total market cap of the S&P information technology sector is about $10.5 trillion. Apple and Microsoft combined account for about a third of that total.
Three of these five giants also have gotten a boost from the unprecedented steps the world has taken to combat the COVID-19 pandemic.
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