Topline
Apple shares soared to an all-time high Tuesday, scoring their biggest daily percentage gain since late 2022 as Wall Street embraced the iPhone maker’s long-awaited announcement of its generative artificial intelligence plans with open arms.
Apple CEO Tim Cook speaks during Apple's annual Worldwide Developers Conference on Monday.
Key Facts
Apple shares rose more than 7% to $207 by the end of normal trading hours, some $8 higher than its prior record close and crossing $200 for the first time ever, adjusting for stock splits.
That propelled a roughly $215 billion surge in Apple’s market capitalization to $3.2 trillion, ranking among the 10 largest daily market value surges in history.
The rally came a day after Apple rolled out a variety of AI features to come to iPhone and other devices later this year, the most notable of which is the integration of OpenAI’s hit generative AI chatbot ChatGPT directly into iPhone applications.
Investors must have slept nicely on the AI rollout, as the Apple stock rise reversed premarket losses and a modest selloff in Monday afternoon trading during and after Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference’s keynote event.
Other large technology stocks were fairly flat, as shares of the world’s five other trillion-dollar tech companies moved less than 1% Tuesday.
Apple closed the market cap gap between it and the world’s largest company Microsoft to less than $50 billion, growing to about $200 billion more valuable than Nvidia, which overtook Apple as the world’s second-biggest company last week.
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Crucial Quote
“Apple’s keynote at WWDC showcased enough enhancements...to assure us of the expected upgrade cycle with the launch of the iPhone 16 and release of iOS18 in the fall of this year,” JPMorgan analysts led by Samik Chatterjee wrote to clients. Apple could surely use a re-ignition of iPhone sales, which are expected to fall to their lowest level since 2020 during the current quarter, according to consensus analyst forecasts compiled by FactSet.
Big Number
7%. That’s how much Apple’s stock is up year-to-date, including dividends. That’s much worse than the S&P 500’s 13% gain, but it still indicates quite the stock market turnaround for Apple, whose shares were down 12% on the year as recently as the end of April.
Key Background
Apple finally introduced its comprehensive “Apple Intelligence” generative AI offerings Monday, a much-expected announcement which rolled out upcoming upgrades to iPhones’ Siri voice assistant and across messaging, all powered by OpenAI. Apple played its AI plans far closer to the vest than its big technology peers like Google parent Alphabet and Facebook parent Meta, both of whom developed their own large-language models to compete with OpenAI’s, and Microsoft, which owns a multibillion-dollar stake in OpenAI. “Apple's stance seems to be, we don't need to pursue artificial general intelligence; we can leave that to Meta, OpenAI, et al, saving billions,” summarized Rosenblatt analyst Barton Crockett. Even after the recent rally, Apple remains behind Microsoft as the world’s most valuable company, a title Apple relinquished in January.
