Michael Dell eating Apple humble pie

It seems impossible to avoid the Apple success story lately and news has just filtered in that Apple are in fact now worth eight times as much as computer giant Dell.

In NASDAQ trading today, Apple gained $1.95 to $239.74 to hit a market value of $218.12 billion or more than 8 times that of Dell's current $25.84 billion.

Why is this significant? Well in 1997 Dell CEO Michael Dell stood in front of a crowd of IT executives and was asked what he would do if he was in charge of Apple and he said “What would I do? I'd shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders.” Them's fighting words indeed Mike.

Unfortunately for Michael it appears he has had to eat humble pie because current market trends are rather damning for Dell Computers. Apple are currently debt free and have around $41.7 billion cash on hand – more than Dell's current total company worth of $25.84 billion. Looking through history we can see that in 2006 Dell were worth around $72 billion … marking a considerable drop in company worth in a short span of four years.

KitGuru says: He who laughs last looks like a smug bastard.

Discuss in our forums here or just leave a quick comment below.

Become a Patron!