What Apples Sh100 trillion can do for Kenyans

NAIROBI, KENYA: Apple the iPhone maker on Thursday reached a market value of more than Sh100 trillion ($1 trillion), a mind boggling figure which makes Kenya’s budget a drop in the ocean.

Kenya’s 2018/19 budget presented by Treasury CS Henry Rotich to parliament in June stands at Sh3.07 trillion which means Apple can support Kenya’s financial plan for the next 33 years.

The tech giant can also offer financial related support to Kenyan counties for the next like over 300 years considering that the counties allocation in 2018/19 budget was at Sh372 billion.

When compared to successful companies in Kenya and abroad, Apple is 100 times bigger than Safaricom whose value as at 29 July 2017 was at one trillion shillings and five times bigger than car maker Toyota.

With the value of Sh100 trillion, it means Apple can pay each citizen in a country with population of 40 million Sh2,500 each. Kenya’s population falls in the 40 million bracket.

Apple was founded in the late 1970s by Steve Jobs and went public in 1980 after helping usher in the era of the personal computer. One of three founders, Jobs was driven out of Apple in the mid-1980s, only to return a decade later and rescue the computer company from near bankruptcy.

In the two decades since, Apple has risen to become the most valuable company in the world by helping popularise yet another era in computing, the smart phone. The iPhone, introduced by Jobs in 2007, has sold more than one billion units.

America’s New York Times reports that Apple’s new 13-figure valuation highlights how a group of enormous companies has come to dominate the United States economy. Today, a smaller cluster of American companies commands a larger share of total corporate profits than since at least the 1970s.

The impact of this phenomenon has been clear in the stock markets, where a band of household-name companies — led by Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Google — has fueled the nine-year bull market, the second-longest behind the rally that ended in 2000. Their successes also are propelling the broader economy, which is on track for its fastest growth rate in a decade.