Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL.US) is truly the phenomenon of our times. The company has managed to combine the latest technology with world-class design and clever marketing in an incredibly impressive way.
The result is a firm which has grown to become the largest in the world by market capitalisation, worth a cool $468 billion. Now usually when a company reaches this size, it grows only slowly, if at all -- after all, elephants don't gallop, do they?
But the remarkable thing about Apple is that the world's largest company remains a growth company. Microsoft and Google may be growing quickly, but Apple is leaving them in the dust. In both 2010 and 2011 it nearly doubled its eps, and another sizeable increase is predicted for 2012.