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AAPL & PGR
By matt | May 9, 2006
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If the ‘words’ above don’t mean much to you, it may be because they are stock ticker symbols. They are, in order, Apple and Progressive Insurance. One is a consumer electronics company, the other is an auto insurance company…
I saw an interesting video on YouTube in which Steve Jobs addresses the Cupertino City Council to tell them that Apple found property for a new campus in Cupertino and plans to stay in the city, even though it would have been cheaper to move outside of Cupertino. When finished, the city council responded with helpful suggestions about how Apple could make the construction of the new campus go smoothly. He also mentioned that Apple had tripled in size in five years. He said that Apple was about a $20 billion company.
Now, you may know that Progressive Insurance is building a third campus again in Mayfield Village. And, interestingly enough, Progressive makes around the same amount of Apple in both net income and total revenue. Really. Progressive Insurance is the same size as Apple and it’s based here in Cleveland…or near enough to count. Additionally, Progressive regularly gets written about quite often for their ‘innovative‘ approaches in an industry that is hardly as interesting as iPods.
Here are a few more stats:
| Price |
Market Cap |
Net Income | Total Revenues | |
| Apple (AAPL) |
71.90 | 52,097 | 1,335 | 13,931 |
|
Progressive Insurance |
107.69 | 20,376 | 1,394 | 14,303 |
(All information on this page taken from Yahoo! Finance on 8-May-06. All dollar values in the table in millions.)
Apple employs about 14,800 people. Progressive employs about 28,000 people.
I don’t think I have a point here, other than it’s kinda interesting to think (a) Apple is smaller than I thought or (b) Progressive is bigger than I thought or (c) a little of both. The market clearly values Apple far more than Progressive (the market cap being 2.5 times bigger for Apple), but tech stocks are all valued more highly than industrial or financial firms.
If you really need more meat, rather than trivia, feel free to talk among yourselves about the personalities that have led each company (Jobs @ Apple, Lewis @ Progressive), what it means to be ‘innovative’ in each industry, whether they are interesting and successful because they are niche players, and so on. In the meantime, it’s time for me to make breakfast.
Topics: economics & business |
May 9th, 2006 at 9:03 pm
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