Apple Stocks Plummet in the Latest Tech Stock Rout

Apple stocks plummet in the latest tech stock rout: Apple's stock market value took a major hit

Apple Stocks Plummet in the Latest Tech Stock Rout: Apple's stock market value took a major hit on Tuesday after its steep drop last year, bringing it below $2 trillion for the first time since March 2021, reveals a Reuters report. The milestone marks a fall from grace for Apple. The stock spent much of the past year outperforming the S&P 500 Index but has stumbled in recent weeks amid fears that iPhone production problems in China will ruin holiday sales, the company's most important period.

Despite being one of the few big tech names to avoid an earnings plunge, Apple still struggled as questions swirled around the popularity of its new products and it faced difficulty with iPhone 14 shipments during the holiday season due to Covid-19 restrictions at its main China factory.

The top 10 tech stocks — the tech companies that were the biggest in terms of their market cap at the end of 2022 — lost a combined $4.6 trillion in market valuation last year.

During 2022, Apple recorded the third-biggest loss in market valuation among the companies in this group — $755 billion — behind only Amazon, which saw its market cap drop by $856 billion, and Google's parent company Alphabet, which recorded a decline of $787 billion, according to the report.

Today, the combined stock market value of Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet and Meta amount to just 18 percent of the S&P 500, down from 24 percent in 2020.

However, despite Apple's 27 percent drop last year, it has offered handsome returns to long-term shareholders. Those who invested in Apple during the first iPhone launch in 2007 have gained over 4,000 percent which doesn't include dividends, compared to a 180 percent gain in the S&P 500 over the same period.