Financial information is, for me, what I’m sure obscure details about cancelled television shows are for most other people: information that goes in one ear and out the other. The truth of the matter is that for the last twenty-five years, I’ve been pretty sure that a “market cap” is something you wear when grocery shopping (to keep vegetables out of your hair, naturally).
Turns out it’s actually a way to measure the economic size and value of a company, a clever figure that’s calculated by multiplying the number of outstanding—outstanding!—shares by the share price. Ad so when the news appeared that Apple had topped Google in market cap for the first time. Of course, what’s really impressive here, to my mind, is that their market cap has grown by about 50% in just over a year. Can anybody say “iPhone”?
As of this writing, Apple’s market cap stands at $159.2 billion which, for those keeping score at home, is roughly $159,199,999,999.00 more money than is in my pocket right now—unrelated: I need to go to the bank.
But what to do with such a big market cap? Our friends over at Infinite Loop think Apple needs to gobble itself up another big company, like Adobe. That seems unlikely to me: Apple’s not one to make such big purchases—their history is one of small, targeted acquisitions. While Adobe’s software library might be attractive to them, I don’t think Apple wants the headaches of managing them.
No, I think Apple will continue to do what it does with most of its money: invest it. Not just in financial sense, but also in the company itself. Apple pours a lot of money into R&D, and—slave wage lawsuits aside—its people. After all, they’ve been building market cap for a while now—at the end of the day, don’t expect it to change the way they’ve been doing business.
My comprehension of matters "Market" is low, bit I believe that you are mistaken. The market cap, being "calculated by multiplying the number of outstanding shares by the share price" has no relation to what actual money Apple has in the bank. It's more what people think of Apple's worth, shown by what they are willing to pay for a share.
Those that feel there should be a windfall profits tax on oil companies would surely agree that Apple should, too. I would assume Apple's ROE is much higher than the oil companies.