Apple Leaps Into Fortune 500 Top 20

Since the untimely death of Steve Jobs in October last year, many pundits have been saying that Apple will start losing sales and slide downwards, as the Jobs “reality distortion field” wears off and Apple bring out less innovative products. So far however, the opposite has been true, proving that Jobs chose his successor well. Apple last year became the most valuable company in the world, with earnings boosted by 85% to 25.9 billion, due to huge sales of the iPhone and iPad totalling $67 billion in 2011.

This success has caused them to jump up the Fortune 500 list of top companies, from 35th place (not bad, really) to 17th, behind HP in 10th place. It looks like the new iPad, anticipation for an iPhone refresh, a potential lower cost MacBook Air and persistent rumours of iTV, Apple-branded television will continue this success. Together with Tim Cook’s performance, these have boosted Fortune’s estimation for the company in the near future. We doubt that Apple’s
little snafu over leaked FileVault passwords will make a dent in these profits and given this increasing success, perhaps Steve Jobs’s charisma wasn’t as helpful for Apple’s fortunes as everyone assumed?

Finally, the top company this year is the type of company everyone loves to hate: an oil company, in the shape of Exxon Mobil, which enjoyed revenues of $453 billion and profits of $41 billion.