Microsoft reached a new milestone Tuesday as the company’s market capitalization hit $2 trillion for the first time.
The Redmond, Wash.-based tech giant trails only Apple among the world’s most valuable companies. Apple became the first publicly traded U.S. company to reach the $2 trillion mark in August. Fellow Seattle-area giant Amazon, valued Tuesday at $1.77 trillion, is also approaching the $2 trillion club.
Microsoft stock was up 1.1% Tuesday and is up more than 20% this year.
The company continues to see growing demand for its cloud services as the pandemic has accelerated technology adoption. It beat quarterly expectations with $41.7 billion in revenue for the March quarter, up 19% year-over-year — its biggest revenue growth since 2018 — and profits of $15.5 billion, up 44%.
A Wedbush report last month projected more growth ahead for Microsoft, with Azure’s cloud momentum “still in its early days” and the company “firmly positioned to gain more market share vs. AWS in this cloud arms race.”
“With workforces expected to have a heavy remote focus, we believe the cloud shift is just beginning to take its next stage of growth globally,” Wedbush analyst Dan Ives wrote. “We believe this disproportionally benefits the cloud stalwart out of Redmond, as Nadella & Co. are so well positioned in its core enterprise backyard to further deploy its Azure/Office 365 as the cloud backbone and artery.”
Microsoft also continues to invest heavily in its gaming business; add new features to its Teams collaboration software; and is staying active in the M&A arena with its $19.7 billion acquisition of Nuance Communications and reported interest in Discord and Pinterest.
This week the attention turns to the company’s Windows operating system. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and Chief Product Officer Panos Panay are scheduled to speak at an event on Thursday where Microsoft is promising to “unveil the next generation of Windows.” Axios reported Tuesday that a refresh of the desktop operating system “can’t come soon enough” as Windows has lost market share to MacOS and Chrome OS over the past decade.
Microsoft has also been able to avoid the same regulatory scrutiny facing other tech giants including Amazon, Apple, Google, and Facebook.
