By Dhirendra Tripathi
Investing.com – Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) stock traded 0.4% higher in Tuesday’s premarket as traders ignored the company's recent store closures in the wake of a rampaging omicron Covid-19 variant.
The iPhone-maker has closed at least 16 stores in New York City including some major ones -- Fifth Avenue, SoHo, Grand Central and World Trade Center locations -- to shoppers because of rising Covid-19 cases, according to Bloomberg. In a slight departure for its New York customers, the company is letting customers place orders online and pick them up at the stores.
The company had already temporarily shut its Carnegie Library store in Washington, as well as outlets in Ohio, Texas, Georgia and Florida. Earlier this month, CEO Tim Cook sent a memo to staff informing them of the company delaying its corporate return-to-office deadline from February 1 to a “date yet to be determined.”
According to New York Times, the seven-day U.S. average of new daily cases climbed past 214,000 Sunday, an 83% jump over the past 14 days. Omicron is now the dominant variant of the virus in many cases and spreading at least twice as fast as delta.
The market has been anticipating Apple’s climb to $182.86, a price that will give what is already the world's highest valued publicly traded company a market cap of $3 trillion.
The stock had closed 2.3% higher Monday at $180.33. The stock touched a lifetime high of $182.13 on December 13 to hit a market cap of $2.98 trillion. It's only four years since the company became the world's first trillion-dollar enterprise.
Several brokerages recently upgraded the stock. BofA analyst Wamsi Mohan and JPMorgan’s Samik Chatterjee see the stock at $210. Evercore’s Amit Daryanani has a target of $200 for the shares.