Saudi Arabia’s oil giant Aramco reclaimed the spot of the world’s most valuable company after a relatively steady performance in Riyadh so far this month, while shares in Apple plunged amid a wider sell-off in tech stocks in New York.
According to estimates from Bloomberg, Aramco – which became the world’s largest listed firm by market capitalization with its listing in December 2019 – has regained the top spot that Apple has held since July 2020 when U.S. equities and tech stocks in particular rallied on U.S. economic stimulus.
At the end of July, Apple unseated oil giant Saudi Aramco as the world’s most valuable company amid a broad rally in U.S. stocks, especially tech stocks. The rally continued into August but came to a halt in September.
So far in September, Saudi Aramco’s shares have risen by 1.1 percent on the Saudi stock exchange Tadawul, while Apple’s stock has declined by 17 percent, Bloomberg has estimated.
In the middle of August, Apple hit the US$2-trillion market capitalization milestone, the first time a U.S. firm had done so. The only other company in the world that has ever seen that market cap is Saudi Aramco, which reached the coveted valuation soon after its listing, but hasn’t kept the US$2-trillion valuation since.
After the sell-off in tech stocks on the NASDAQ in the past two weeks, Apple’s valuation is now around US$1.9 trillion, just below Saudi Aramco’s.
In the first week of September, Apple set records for market value erased as tech stocks plunged. On September 3, Apple saw as much as US$180 billion off its market capitalization erased—the most any U.S. listed firm has shed in market value in a single day.
Meanwhile, Aramco’s stock has been relatively resilient in the face of the recent oil price slump, party thanks, according to Bloomberg, to the oil giant’s pledge to keep distributing massive dividends as planned despite taking a severe hit to its earnings.
