Apple is the world’s largest information technology company by revenue. It is also the world’s largest technology company by total assets, and the world’s second largest mobile phone manufacturer, by volume, after Samsung. In November 2014, Apple became the first U.S. company to be valued at over US$700 billion in addition to being the largest publicly traded corporation in the world by market capitalization.The company employs 115,000 full-time employees as of July 2015 and maintains 478 retail stores in seventeen countries as of March 2016. It operates the online Apple Store and iTunes Store, the latter of which is the world’s largest music retailer. Consumers use more than one billion Apple products worldwide as of March 2016.