10 February 2014, News Wires – US supermajor ExxonMobil has taken third chair on the list of the country’s most valuable publicly traded companies after losing ground to tech giant Google in market capitalisation.
As of market close on Friday, Google had a market cap of $395.42 billion compared with ExxonMobil’s $392.66 billion valuation.
The oil and gas behemoth’s New York-listed shares have been on the decline in recent weeks and have lost around 10% of their value since the first of the year. A lacklustre quarterly earnings report that showed profits were down 16% – and down 27% on the year – did not help the stock.
Google shares, meanwhile, have been rising steadily and are up around 5% since the start of the year and 66% since the beginning of last year.
The internet-search company is the second tech mammoth to surpass ExxonMobil in recent years. Apple passed up ExxonMobil in 2011, but the Rex Tillerson-led companyregained the throne in 2013.
ExxonMobil’s flagging stock price has since allowed Apple to take the lead, and the gadget builder remains the leading US company by market cap at $463.55 billion, as of Friday.
Both Apple and Google increased their leads over ExxonMobil in morning trade on Monday, with market caps of $473.83 billion and $395.26 billion, respectively, at 12:30 pm in New York. Both tech stocks are listed on the Nasdaq.
ExxonMobil’s shares, listed on the New York Stock Exchange, were down just over 1% on Monday morning at $89.63 apiece for a market cap of $391.68 billion.
The stock is down from where it was trading in mid-November when ace investor Warren Buffett revealed that his company Berkshire Hathaway had acquired an approximate $3.44 billion stake in the Texas oil company, a move seen as a vote of confidence for the supermajor.
That announcement, made public on 15 November when ExxonMobil’s shares were trading around the $94 mark, gave a short-term boost to ExxonMobil’s stock. Shares in the company traded above $100 as recently as 17 January.
– Upstream