An excellent read by Jeff Sommer for the New York Times about the financial impact of the iPhone on the global economy.
“The iPhone is having a measurable impact,” said Michael Feroli, the chief United States economist for JPMorgan Chase. “It’s a little gadget, but it costs a lot and it seems that everybody has one. When you do the multiplication, it’s going to matter.” He estimates that iPhone sales are adding one-quarter to one-third of a percentage point to the annualized growth rate of the gross domestic product.
If you want to learn more about the economic ramifications of the iPhone, I recommend you read the whole piece.
Some interesting data from the article:
- iPhone sales are estimated to add 1/4 to 1/3 of a percentage point to the annualized growth rate of the US GDP
- iPhone accounts for a disproportionately large percentage of Apple’s overall profit, somewhere between 60 and 70%
- Apple is the biggest company, by market capitalization, in the world
- Apple accounts for about 3.5 percent of the weighting of the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index
- Apple accounted for 18 percent of the entire rise of the S.&P. 500 index this year