Apple

After 13 years of uninterrupted expansion, Apple’s sales dropped for the first time at the start of 2016. But what a streak it was. Driven by the iPod, iPad and, above all, the iPhone, the company’s revenue jumped to $234 billion in the most recent fiscal year from $14 billion a decade earlier. Even after a stock decline last year, it was valued at more than $500 billion. The users of its 1 billion active devices comprise a global elite and its wannabes. Apple’s got the most cash, the strongest brand and the world’s best-performing retail stores, but the sales hiccup underscored questions about whether its business model can endure.

Apple sells only a handful of luxury-class products and never adjusts its prices to match competitors. Steve Jobs, its co-founder, smashed the long-held tech industry dogma that an open standard — think Microsoft’s Windows or Google’s Android operating systems that can work on any hardware — beats a closed, proprietary platform such as Apple’s. He did so by pouring resources into design and customer service, disciplines that tech giants treated as afterthoughts. With just a few devices running on the same software, and a large percentage of repeat buyers, Apple is able to spend far less on R&D and marketing than Microsoft and Google do. But Apple’s No. 1 seller, the iPhone, is also the biggest source of concern. The iPhone accounted for 66 percent of Apple’s 2015 revenue. In early 2016, the company reported its first year-on-year decline in quarterly sales in more than a decade. It rolled out its iPhone 7 line in September in the hopes that pent-up appetite for a new model would reignite sales. Earlier this year, investors had ended Apple’s four-year run as the world’s most valuable company when the market value of Alphabet, the parent company of Google, briefly surpassed Apple’s in February. Apple is now looking beyond its home-grown products — it announced a $1 billion investment in Didi, China’s largest ride-hailing service, in May — and opened Siri, its voice-activated personal assistance, to third-party apps, hoping to increase revenue from software and to keep messaging programs pushed by Google and Facebook at bay. In August, Apple was ordered to pay a record 13 billion euros ($14.5 billion) plus interest after the European Commission said Ireland illegally slashed the iPhone maker’s tax bill. Apple said it would appeal. But it certainly could afford to pay, with $231.5 billion in cash and equivalents on hand.