DL stock and market cap keeps climbing

[WorldTraveler]

DL's stock price has pushed thru the $20 mark and its market cap is now over $17 billion, the highest of any airline in the Americas and one of the highest in the world.

For comparison, UAL's market cap is $11.5B, LUV's is just under $10B, ALK is $4.4B and LCC is $3B.
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=DAL+Key+Statistics

 

[blue collar]

Who cares about market cap? That's only the value of shares... They have a high stock price, but also have a lot of shares out there. It's not a true view of how well they are as a company.

If you look at the enterprise value of DL it is 13.79B, whereas UAL is 17.35B. The enterprise value is a more accurate measure of how the company is doing, although that doesn't fit your agenda of telling the world how good delta is and how bad all the others are.

 

[WorldTraveler]

There are a number of measures that can measure financial performance but market cap is indeed the most widely accepted measure of the value of a company.


UA's market cap would be a lot higher if they hadn't taken so long to get their automation issues resolved (or better yet have done it in the first place as part of the merger process). UA is on the recovery but they lost a lot of momentum since the merger was consummated trying to figure out how to get the company moving. Note also that UA is now starting to cancel poor performing flights like EWR-EZE and pulling excess capacity which is exactly the kind of thing that has to be done as part of the merger process but UA has not addressed until recently.

We'll see what UA's market cap does after its next earnings announcement but for now DL's earnings and market cap are well ahead of UA's - whether you want to admit it or not.
DL pulled off the first US airline megamerger and has several years in a headstart compared to UA and AA... doesn't mean they won't reap some of the same benefits in time but you really shouldn't be surprised that DL is at a stronger point....