Apple bumps AT&T out of 30 blue chips in Dow Jones Industrial Average

Apple Inc joined the Dow Jones Industrial Average on Thursday, dislodging aging telecoms icon AT&T from the 30 companieslisted in Wall Street's blue-chip index.
Apple's extremely high stock valuation had kept it out of the Dowindustrials, until a seven-for-one stock split that brought the shareprice closer to the dow.
Credit card company Visa's own four-for-one stock split, carried outThursday, required revisions to the index's weighting, opening anopportunity to replace AT&T with Apple.
'As the largest corporation in the world and a leader in technology,Apple is the clear choice for the Dow Jones Industrial Average,' saidDavid Blitzer, managing director of S&P Dow Jones Indices.
Around 2 pm (1800 GMT) Thursday, the Dow Jones Industrial Average wasat 17,953.86, down 0.68 per cent from Wednesday's closing mark of18,072.58.
Apple was off about 0.54 per cent in Thursday trading at 127.77dollars a share.
Visa, whose global retail electronic payments network makes it asmuch a technology firm as a financial giant, is itself a relativenewcomer to the Dow industrials, having been included in September2013 in a larger revision that also brought in bank Goldman Sachs andsports branding titan Nike.
Launched in 1896 by Wall Street pioneer Charles Dow as a 12-stockbarometer of industrial listings, the average was expanded in 1916 to20 stocks.
The index has contained 30 stocks since 1928.