Apple’s constant and rapid growth is already baffling the experts, but it could soon be challenging the law of large numbers, the New York Times reports. The theorem, attributed to Swiss mathematician Jacob Bernoulli, states that a variable will revert to a mean over a long period of time. In normal English, this means that the larger the company is, the slower it should grow, but Apple are proving this wrong.
Even if Apple grow at 20% for the next decade, well below its current growth rate, it would be worth $3 trillion by 2022, which is more than the 2011 gross domestic product of France or Brazil, two of the world’s biggest economies. You can estimate that by 2018 or 2019, they would have enough money to comfortably buy Greece, bail them out, and create one huge Apple Store or data center. Even though that’s very unlikely, they would easily be able to do that if they continue growing.
However other companies in the past like Cisco also experienced huge growth, in their case during internet bubble in 2000, followed by a huge fall afterwards. Their market capitalization was $557 million at the peak of the bubble but it is $100 million today, just under a fifth of the price. I doubt that will happen to Apple anytime soon as they were very special circumstances with the internet boom, but everything that goes up has to come down at some stage, even it if isn’t for while.
