In the middle of last summer, Apple CEO Tim Cook announced a historic operational, industrial and financial milestone: the Apple company had reached 3 billion iPhone devices sold since its launch in 2007, led by its co-founder and CEO, Steve Jobs. This success was decisive in catapulting the company onto the stock market, which has just surpassed yet another all-time high, exceeding, for the first time, the threshold of four trillion dollars in market capitalization. In the last five years the shares have accumulated a revaluation of close to 130%.
This progress, in addition to the premium from stock appreciation, was accompanied by another milestone for investors: Over the past five years, Apple has allocated more than $511.5 billion to shareholder compensation.
Of these funds, over the past five years the company has allocated $436.6 billion to subsequent share repurchase plans and compensated investors with $74.9 billion through dividends.
Over the course of 2025 (the company ends its fiscal year at the end of September), Apple repurchased $89.3 billion in stock and paid $15.4 billion in dividends. In May of this year, in fact, the company announced a new plan to repurchase securities for an amount of up to 100,000 million.
Likewise, Apple has not stopped increasing it year after year. If in 2021 it paid $0.21 per share every quarter, starting from May 2025, after the last increase, it started paying $0.26 per share.
The biggest beneficiaries were the major shareholders: Vanguard Group, owner of 9.58% of the capital; BlackRock, 7.78%; and State Street, with 4.07%. Among the European investors in Apple, the Norwegian Norges Bank stands out, with 1.28% of the capital; and UBS, with 1.13% of the shares.
Among the main Spanish investors in Apple, CaixaBank Asset Managemente, manager of CaixaBank, stands out, with over three million shares, according to the ranking drawn up by Bloomberg, together with 2.31 million shares of Banco Santander and 2.13 million of BBVA.
Another big beneficiary was Berkshire Hathaway, the investment holding company of veteran Warren Buffett, which owns 1.89% of Apple’s capital. In recent weeks, regarding Buffett’s imminent retirement, various specialized media have highlighted that Apple represents 24% of Berkshire Hathaway’s portfolio.
And while Apple is considered a technology company by many, Buffett has always valued the consumer goods side of its business. Sell millions of devices with a large, connected community. Among these, the aforementioned iPhone stands out, which represents almost half of the Apple company’s revenue.
When it comes to its own operations, Apple has continued to set records. In the fiscal fourth quarter, the company grew revenue 8% to $102.5 billion. It was the first time that the Apple company exceeded the 100 billion mark in the second half of the summer quarter, thanks to the momentum of the iPhone, with the arrival of the new iPhone 17, iPhone 17 Pro, Pro Max and iPhone Air models, and of the services business unit, which also beat its historical record.
Thus, for the entire fiscal year, Apple increased its total revenues by 6.4% more, to 416,161 million dollars, an unprecedented figure in its history, with the iPhone division contributing 209,586 million, more than half. The company also recorded a 20% increase in net profit, which reached 112,010 million, with strong progress in the last quarter, in which it practically doubled profits, exceeding 27,466 million.
To realize these innovations and develop others in the pipeline, Apple committed $34.55 billion in research and development throughout the year, up 10%. Investors and the legion of lovers of technology and products of the American company are already waiting for future innovative developments. Among the reports of investment banks there is already talk of the future business of humanoid robots, thanks to artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, with prospects of many billions.
