Steve Jobs Is Financial Times' Person of the Year

Britain's Financial Times has named Steve Jobs, the brains behind the most influential company in the consumer technology world, Apple, as Person of the Year.

The distinction of being chosen as the most fascinating figure for 2010 by a key influence driver in the business world caps Apple's phenomenal year which peaked during the launch of the iPad and the iPhone 4.

Jobs, according to the Financial Times, has managed to push Apple back to top form after a period when he and the company he co-founded were considered as finished. UK's top daily newspaper also notes that Apple continues to create jobs even when most companies in the U.S. are firing employees to cut costs.

The $287.5-billion Cupertino, California-based company with a knack for spawning breakthrough products such as the iPod and ITunes, and Mac laptop has a worldwide annual sales of $65.23 billion. Apple is number 2 on Bloomberg Businessweek's 26 Tech Hot Growth Companies for 2010, eclipsed only by China's Tencent Holdings.

The 55-year-old Jobs, known to the electronics world as the insanely creative, black turtleneck-clad genius, set the stage for Apple's excitement-packed year with the introduction of the iPad tablet in April. The revolutionary slate-style gadget which ushered in the era of tablet computing surpassed the 1 million sales mark only 28 days after it was launch.

Goldman Sachs expects some 37.2 million iPads to be shipped by next year, making Apple among the biggest vendors in the personal computing market.

And then there was the slate smartphone, the iPhone 4. The Wall Street Journal's Walt Mossberg hailed the iPhone 4 as "the best device in its class," while Engadget described it as "the best smartphone on the market right now."

In a news conference, President Obama praised Jobs for his innovation. "We celebrate somebody like a Steve Jobs, who has created two or three different revolutionary products. We expect that person to be rich, and that's a good thing. We want that incentive. That's part of the free market," Obama said.

Earlier, Time Magazine named Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg as its Person of the Year. Time said the 26-year-old Harvard dropout with a net worth of US$6.9 billion was given the award "for connecting more than half a billion people and mapping the social relations among them; for creating a new system of exchanging information; and for changing how we all live our lives."