Microsoft officially hit a trillion dollar market cap yesterday, making it the third US company to do so.
The market opened with shares sitting at $US130 ($185) each, which is up about four per cent on the previous closing price of $US125 ($178). The price fluctuated throughout the day, as you’d expect, and closed at $US129.15 ($184), which is still up by 3.31 per cent.
While the big $1T was brief (it’s now just under $US991B), it puts Microsoft among Apple and Amazon – both of which have hit the magic number previously – and ahead of Google, which hasn’t just yet.
The news also puts Microsoft on top of Apple as the most valuable company, a title the two have been stealing from each other for quite some time. The last time Microsoft overtook the iPhone maker was back in November of 2018.
The gains are thanks to the company’s last quarter earnings, which boasted particularly strong performance with its cloud offering. Known as Azure, the service has been growing over recent years but is still behind Amazon’s AWS.
Azure is gaining a solid reputation for being a reliable cloud solution, and there’s no doubt Microsoft’s game streaming service, Project xCloud, will be an enormous test of its strengths. If it can pull that off, particularly here in Australia where our internet is, you know, pretty shitty, it’ll be a huge success.
As The Verge points out, Microsoft’s biggest earnings are still pulled in from its Windows, Xbox, and Surface products, adding up to $US10.7 billion ($15.2B) in revenue. By comparison, cloud, server, and enterprise services brought in $US9.7 billion ($13.8B) for the software giant.