Apple became the world’s most valuable public company by market capitalization in 2011.
Apple overtook ExxonMobil in 2011 as its share price and investor confidence rose sharply. The change symbolized the growing importance of consumer technology and the iPhone, which had been introduced four years earlier.
Apple’s success was built on an integrated ecosystem of hardware, software, and digital services. Products such as the iPod, iPhone, iPad, and Mac were designed to work together, while the App Store encouraged developers to create software for Apple devices.
ExxonMobil remained one of the world’s largest corporations by revenue and energy production, but revenue rankings and market-capitalization rankings measure different things. Market cap reflects the stock market’s current valuation of a company’s outstanding shares and can change daily with prices and expectations.