Google will beat Apple to become the first member of the $1 trillion club, a top tech analyst predicted on Friday.
To pull off the incredible feat, Google would have to more than double Apple’s stock performance over the next 5¹/₄ years.
The analyst predicted Google would cross the 10-figure mark in market capitalization by 2020.
Over the last five years, Apple has more than doubled — 274 percent vs. 115 percent — Google’s stock performance.
“Google is positioned to be the first company on [a] US listed stock exchange to have a market capitalization exceed one trillion dollars,” BGC Capital analyst Colin Gillis wrote in a research note to clients on Friday.
Google is positioned to grow like wildfire thanks to the online search company’s investments in areas like self-driving cars and robotics, Gillis wrote.
“If you look at the range of [projects] Google is attacking, it represents opportunities on a much more massive scale than Apple is addressing,” Gillis told The Post.
“What are we going to get from Apple — a thinner iPad?” he chided.
Apple, the most valuable US company, has a market capitalization of $599 billion — way ahead of Google’s $372 billion valuation.
Market capitalization is the share price times the number of shares outstanding.
Apple also towers over Google in revenues, posting record sales of $170.9 billion in fiscal 2013, which ended last September. Google, by contrast, posted revenues of $55.5 billion in 2013.
While Apple has a wide lead, the Cupertino, Calif., company has showed signs of waning growth, which led to a stock price decline in 2013 that forced CEO Tim Cook to agree to buy back $130 billion shares over three years — the largest stock buyback in history.
For the 12 months ended Sept. 30, Apple increased revenues by just 9.6 percent — down from 43.6 percent growth the previous year. Apple’s earnings-per-share growth also fell more than 10 percent last year.
Google, by contrast, saw revenues grow by 19.5 percent in 2013, while earnings per share were up 11.4 percent.
Gillis gave Google a $650-per-share price target for the next 12 months. The maker of Google Glass closed Friday at $544.49 a share.
Of course, not everyone agrees that Apple’s days of double-digit growth are over — despite last year’s hiccup.
Billionaire Carl Icahn on Thursday predicted that Apple is “poised to take market share from Google” when it comes to the cell phone market.
Icahn never uttered the “T” word when discussing his Apple forecast, but the billionaire said he thinks Apple should be trading at $203 a share — more than double Apple’s current stock of $100 a share.
By that metric, Apple should already be worth $1.2 trillion.
Icahn also predicted Apple will return to double-digit earnings growth next year — thanks in part to the power of the Apple “ecosystem,” boosted by new products like the recently introduced Apple Pay and the Apple Watch.
Icahn forecast EPS growth at Apple of 25 percent for fiscal 2015 and 30 percent a year in both 2016 and 2017.