Apple’s market value fell to $2.37 trillion on Wednesday, the share price of which fell more than 5 percent on the New York stock market.
Apple, which has lost approximately $540 billion in value since the beginning of the year, returned the title of the most valuable company to Saudi Arabian oil and gas producer Aramco after two years.
Microsoft, one of the other big technology companies whose market value has decreased, has been about 19 percent since the beginning of the year; Google 21 percent; Facebook 38 percent; Amazon 31 percent; Alibaba 24 percent; Tesla lost 15.5 percent in value.
The decline was also reflected in private tech startups that were not publicly traded. According to the British Financial Times newspaper, payment systems startup Stripe, which became one of the San Francisco-based start-ups that reached the highest valuation in venture capital investments with $95 billion last March, lost 4 percent in the first quarter of 2022.
Hopin, an online conference startup, lost 40 percent in the same period.
Bitcoin and other major cryptocurrencies, which fell to their lowest level since December 2020, also continued to decline.
WHAT CAUSES THE FALLS?
It is stated that the tendency of investors to switch to assets that they see as less risky is effective in the sales that caused great decreases in many areas, from the most valuable publicly traded companies to startups and even cryptocurrencies.
After the United States (USA) announced yesterday that its inflation was approaching the highest level in 40 years, the technology stocks-weighted Nasdaq stock market closed with a decrease of 3.2 percent.
However, rising energy and commodity prices are perceived as one of the biggest risks to the post-pandemic economic recovery.
Japan’s SoftBank Group on Thursday announced that Vision Fund, one of the world’s largest technology investment funds, posted a record $26.2 billion loss.
This was in stark contrast to the company’s record annual profit announcement a year ago.
The venture has also lost value over the past year, including ride-hailing apps Didi and Grab, of which SoftBank is an investor.
PANDEMIC EFFECT
Apple became the first company to reach a valuation of $3 trillion on the stock market in January 2020. Increasing spending on tech hardware and software during coronavirus shutdowns has made the industry one of the biggest winners of the pandemic.
According to World Bank data, Apple’s market value has surpassed the UK economy, which has a size of $ 2.76 trillion.
The world’s largest technology companies have experienced increased demand for their products and services as the use of smartphones, tablets and laptops has increased during the pandemic shutdowns.
With the shutdowns coming to an end and people returning to the offices, investors seem to think that this uptrend has come to an end.
Zoom’s stock market valuation, which approached $160 billion at the start of the pandemic, dropped to $26 billion this week.
Saudi Aramco, on the other hand, increased its profits sharply, driven by rising energy prices.
Saudi Arabia is the largest producer of OPEC, which is made up of the world’s largest oil exporting countries. State-owned Saudi Aramco more than doubled its net profit from $49 billion in 2020 to $110 billion in 2021.
Increasing demand after the pandemic and the Ukraine war were the main factors that drove oil prices up.