Homework 9

Have you ever wondered how much companies like Apple, Amazon or even Face book are worth? What if I told you those companies are worth more then places like Sears and Wal-Mart and they don’t even have a place where you can physically shop at?  What I am saying is true. In a recent showing or just in this article it says Recently Apple’s value peaked at $600B.  Yes, that is an astounding number; for it reflects not only 50% greater value than the oil giant Exxon/Mobil (~$390B), but more than the entire value of the stock markets in Spain, Greece and Portugal combined! Think about it apple a computer company is worth more than three countries combined. How mind blowing is that? In the world we live in times have drastically changed, maybe for the better because think about it over three hundred years ago people who were rich earned land. Now its how big your computer company is.  Think about the incredible shift that has happened in retail.  America’s largest and most successful retailer from the 1900 turn of the century well into the 1960s was Sears.  In an industry that long equated success with “location, location, location” Sears has had, and continues to control, enormous amounts of land and buildings.  But the value of Sears has declined like a stone pitched off a bridge, now worth only $6B (1% the Apple value) despite all that real estate! What surprised me the most is that Wal-mart one of the world’s biggest stores doesn’t have more income than Amazon a internet site. By becoming a tech company, Amazon is clearly well on the way to dominating retail, as Sears falls into irrelevancy and almost surely bankruptcy, and Wal-Mart stalls under the overhead of all that land, buildings, inventory and vast number of minimum-wage, uninsured employees. We now must realize that value is not created by what accountants have long called “hard assets” – land, buildings and equipment.  You have to ask yourself is this how the world is going? The fact that face book bought instagram shows this because everyone wants pictures an market price for just instagram shows how much money Facebook will make.  To be honest at the rate things are going I wouldn’t be surprised if stores that sell food soon will be like this. But ask yourself is this just making society lazy, losing interactions with others, or does it benefit it?