Apple's Stock IPO and Fun Facts

Apple, Inc.'s initial public offering (IPO) was on December 12, 1980 at $22.00 per share. Since that time Apple's stock has split two for 1 on three separate occasions: 1987, 2000, and 2005. In 2014, Apple issued a 7 for 1 stock split followed by another 4 for 1 split in 2020. Basically what that means is that you would have 224 shares today for every share purchased at the end of 1980. So let's say you invested $5,000 dollars in Apple's IPO. Assuming you could buy fractional shares you would have purchased 227.27 shares of stock at the IPO price of $22.00. Of course, you likely wouldn't have gotten in at the IPO price, but you could have bought the stock even cheaper at many points until after 1985 when it broke above the initial public offering price for good. Anyway, the 227.27 shares purchased at Apple's IPO for $5,000 would have turned into 50,908.48 shares today. Based on the 12-29-23 closing price of $192.53, that $5,000 investment in Apple's IPO would be worth $9,801,409.65 today.

As impressive as that number is, it still doesn't include reinvested dividends. I know some of you might be thinking, "Wait a minute, Apple didn't pay a dividend until 2012," however, Apple actually paid a small dividend from 1987 to 1995. The actual dividend payment ranged from $0.06 per share to $0.12 per share each quarter. From the excel worksheets used to calculate the Stock Performance Guide, I plugged in the 227.27 shares purchased at the IPO and reinvested dividends would have accounted for another 14865.75 shares of stock in AAPL today. These 14865.75 shares account for another $2,862,102.70 of Apple stock today. Therefore the total value of a $5,000 investment in Apple, Inc. at its IPO would be worth $12,663,512.37, assuming all dividends had been reinvested into more Apple stock.

I've calculated a few other fun facts and statistics about Apple. Based on its last twelve months of sales it generated 385.71 billion dollars in revenue with 161,000 full time employees. If you calculate that out, Apple generated $2,395,714.29 in sales for every full time employee working at the company. When you think about that for minute, that is incredible, Apple generated over 2 million dollars in sales for every employee. However, to put that in perspective, I will go from one of the most loved companies in the world (Apple) to one of the most despised (Exxon Mobil). Exxon Mobil generated 338.20 billion dollars in sales with 62,000 full time employees over the last 12 months. That equates to an amazing $5,636,666.67 in sales per employee for Exxon Mobil. To be fair Exxon Mobil does this selling a product pretty much everyone has to use in some form or another while Apple sells products that are not a necessity at all. Instead people buy Apple's products because they want them, rather than need them, making their sales per employee all the more impressive.

Another fun calculation about Apple is to divide the United States population of 335.9 million people into the sales revenue of Apple over the last twelve months (385.71 billion). Granted Apple sells products all over the world, but using just the U.S. population, every person in the country spent $1148.29 on Apple products last year. If you use the world population of around 8.1 billion people, Apple still generated sales of $47.62 from every person on the planet. When you consider that there are many people out there that don't even have electricity or running water, this is a staggering figure for a discretionary purchase. Anyway, I thought many of you would appreciate this unique analysis of Apple. Thanks for visiting 1Stock1.com.