Apple has become the world's first public company to be worth $US1 trillion ($NZ1.4 trillion).
Photo: AFP
The company edged over the $US1 trillion mark as it continued to gain after its strong quarterly earnings report earlier this week.
Started in the garage of co-founder Steve Jobs in 1976, Apple has pushed its revenue beyond the value of the economies of most developed countries. Its market value is more than five times the value of the New Zealand economy.
The Silicon Valley stalwart's stock has surged more than 50,000 percent since its 1980 initial public offering.
One of three founders, Mr Jobs was driven out of Apple in the mid-1980s, only to return a decade later and rescue the computer company from near bankruptcy.
That signalled the start of the company's transition from a computer company to a device maker.
In 2001 it launched the iPod music player, six years later the iPhone. Its growth and profits have been driven each year by new more sophisticated model of the ubiquitous phone, which have been economic to make and sold expensively.
Steve Jobs died in 2011 and was succeeded as chief executive by Tim Cook, who has doubled the company's profits but has not found a replacement for the society-altering success of the iPhone, which has seen sales taper off in recent years.
Jeff Carbone, of investment advisers Cornerstone Financial Partners, has included Apple in his clients' portfolios for about a decade.
"We still see upside from it, and as new money gets deposited we continue to buy, preferably on the dip," he said.
Apple is the New Zealand Superannuation Fund's biggest overseas equity investment, with its stake worth NZ$406 million as at the end of May.
The corporation has been queried often about its business structures and tax avoidance mechanisms to minimise how much tax it pays around the world.
In 2016 it was ordered by the European Commission to pay the Irish government €13 billion in back taxes after it was ruled to have used a sweetheart deal with the administration to reduce its tax bill significantly.
Its New Zealand subsidiary had sales of $811m in the year ended September 2017, up 9 percent on the year before. The net profit tripled to $19.5m in that year, with the company paying tax of $10m compared with $3m the year before.
However, Apple's tenure at the top of the sharemarket may be short lived. It could lose its lead to the likes of Alphabet, which owns Google, or e-commerce giant Amazon.