On Monday, Broadcom Inc.’s stock got a big boost that helped it move even higher up the list of the biggest U.S. companies.
The market value of Broadcom AVGO, +5.41% shares rose 5.4% on Monday, making the company worth more than Eli Lilly & Co. LLY, +0.75% for the first time in more than two years, according to Dow Jones Market Data. The chip company moved up to No. 8 on the list of the most valuable U.S. companies.
Broadcom’s market value was over $847 billion at the end of the day, while Eli Lilly’s was over $841 billion. Broadcom first went over $800 billion on Friday, and it went over $700 billion for the first time on Thursday.
According to Dow Jones Market Data, the company has risen quickly over the past few years. It was the 52nd-largest company in the S&P 500 SPX five years ago and the 16th-largest company in the S&P 500 SPX a year ago. Broadcom did get some help from its purchase of VMware, which closed at the end of last year and raised the market value of the company by about $50 billion, according to FactSet.
Recently, analysts have been big fans of Broadcom’s stock. Harsh Kumar of Piper Sandler wrote over the weekend, “We continue to see [Broadcom] as the best AI play [excluding Nvidia] due to its strong positioning in the custom ASIC business along with its strong software portfolio.” Kumar was talking about application-specific integrated circuits.
Ben Reitzes of Melius Research asked the same thing when he said he thought Broadcom was the “other” AI stock. He wrote that the company’s AI sales went up 280% from the previous year and are a play on Alphabet Inc. GOOG, +0.23% GOOGL, +0.25% and Meta Platforms Inc. META, +0.49% spending money on new equipment.
Yesterday was the seventh day in a row that Broadcom shares went up. They are now up more than 30% in that time. The stock went up 12.3% just on Thursday, which shows that Wall Street was optimistic about Broadcom’s latest earnings report and the possibility that its AI forecast could be too optimistic.
