Apple has been steadily inching closer to a 12-zero valuation and the hotly anticipated iPhone 8 could help push closer to the line.
The largest tech company in the world and number three on the Fortune 500 list may be the first to reach a $1 trillion valuation. The tech giant climbed to over $840 billion in September, an increase of more than 500% over the last ten years.
Wall Street analysts expect the iPhone 8 release could be especially good news for shareholders if it’s able to steal marketshare from Android users. But there’s a bit of trepidation: Apple shares fell last year after the release of the iPhone 7.
Analysts have been saying that Apple could cross the $1 trillion threshold in 2018. Even Warren Buffet believes the company will make it there before Berkshire Hathaway — he’s invested $1 billion in Apple stock over the last year.
But what about the competition?
Alphabet, Facebook, Microsoft, and Amazon are all chasing the ten-digit trajectory, but none is expected to beat Apple to that milestone finish line.
Google’s parent company, Alphabet, has some way to go before it catches up. It has the second largest market cap, $649 billion, among the S&P 500 cohort. That means it has a $351 billion gap between it and the $1 trillion mark, more than twice the size of Apple’s $160 billion gap.
To put this amount of money in perspective, consider it in terms of gross domestic product. If Apple was a country, it would be the 18th richest in the world ranked by 2016 GDP.
The chart above shows where Apple falls among the world’s largest economies as of September 2017, but if it hits $1 trillion it would move up between Mexico and Indonesia. Reaching that mark would make Apple richer than all but 15 nations on earth.
Market caps and GDPs aren’t perfect comparisons, but the metric has one important proponent: In 2001 Warren Buffett told former Fortune’s Carol Loomis that he thought it was “probably the best single measure of where valuations stand at any given moment.”
