Apple Shares Gain As Cook Drops Hints of Autonomous Car

© Reuters.

By Dhirendra Tripathi

Investing.com – Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) shares rose 2% Monday, boosted by its CEO Tim Cook signaling that an autonomous car may be in the offing.

Strong jobs data helped the S&P 500 and Dow touch all-time highs. Apple’s share price has more than doubled in a year.

A usually reserved Cook, much like the company he heads, dropped hints in an interview about the company’s much-rumored plans for an autonomous car.

 “The autonomy itself is a core technology, in my view. If you sort of step back, the car, in a lot of ways, is a robot. An autonomous car is a robot. And so there’s lots of things you can do with autonomy. And we’ll see what Apple does,” he said in an interview with Kara Swisher on the ‘Sway’ podcast released Monday.

When asked if Apple was working on such a car itself or a technology within it, Cook declined to comment.

“We love to integrate hardware, software, and services, and find the intersection points of those because we think that’s where the magic occurs. And so that’s what we love to do. And we love to own the primary technology that’s around that,” he said.

An autonomous car is seen as the next big thing from Apple’s stable, known less for being the first in the segment, but more for being the best in class.

The U.S. Labor Department said on Friday that nonfarm payrolls surged by 916,000 jobs last month, the biggest gain since last August. That was well above economists’ median forecast of 647,000 and was closer to markets’ whisper number of 1 million, Reuters said.

Data for February was also revised to show 468,000 jobs were created instead of the previously reported 379,000.

Adding to the optimism was an ISM survey for March that showed a measure of U.S. services industry activity jumped to a record high, according to Reuters.