Microsoft becomes world's most valuable company, out of the shadows of Apple, Amazon and Google

According to Leifeng.com, U.S. technology stocks have continued to fall recently. As of the close of this Friday, Apple's market value was $746.82 billion, Amazon's market value was $736.62 billion, and Google's market value was $725.52 billion. Microsoft's market value was $753.34 billion, surpassing Apple, which had a market value of more than $1 trillion, changing the situation of living under Apple's shadow for nearly 10 years.

According to statistics provided by mspoweruser, the last time the market values ​​of Apple and Microsoft were close to each other was in 2010. Although the market values ​​of both Microsoft and Apple have shown an upward trend in the following years, it is obvious that Microsoft's increase is lower than that of Apple.

Moreover, earlier this year, Market Cap said that Apple and Amazon were the most valuable technology companies in the world, as their market capitalizations exceeded the $1 trillion mark. However, with this round of stock price declines, including Apple, Amazon, and Google's parent company Alphabet Inc, have lost a lot of market value, and Microsoft now looks like the most valuable technology company in Silicon Valley.

Investors, concerned about slowing revenue growth at the so-called FANG companies (Facebook, Apple, Netflix and Google), are betting that Microsoft's revenue from cloud services and software will remain strong as the software giant works to improve efficiency and productivity while Facebook and Google come under increasing scrutiny.

Investors' concerns are not without reason. Apple CFO Luca Maestri said in the Q3 earnings conference of fiscal year 2018 that starting from the Q1 earnings of fiscal year 2019, Apple's earnings data will undergo four major changes. The most notable change is that Apple will no longer publish sales data for iPhone, iPad and Mac in its earnings report. Leifeng.com previously analyzed that the main reason why Apple no longer publishes sales data may be that the iPhone has achieved initial coverage of many target user groups around the world and is almost unable to achieve continued sales growth. Facebook is troubled by the continued fermentation of privacy data leaks, and Facebook CEO Zuckerberg is also under tremendous pressure.

On the other hand, according to Microsoft's Q1 financial report for fiscal year 2019 ending September 30, 2018, released on October 25, revenue was $29.1 billion, a year-on-year increase of 19%; net profit was $8.8 billion, a year-on-year increase of 34%. Both key figures are higher than analysts' expectations. Microsoft's three major business segments in the financial report, productivity and business processes, intelligent cloud, and computing business, all achieved revenue growth, and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said in the financial report conference that Microsoft's focus in the future will include Microsoft 365 and Dynamics 365, which are tools for enterprises to improve productivity and carry out digital transformation.

In addition, Microsoft announced on its official blog on June 4 this year that it would acquire the code hosting platform GitHub for $7.5 billion. Microsoft said it would value the power of developers and integrate them with Microsoft's products. As for the major driving force of Microsoft's revenue growth, the industry expects Microsoft's cloud to perform well because its cloud service Azure is in a solid second position. At the same time, Microsoft is increasingly relying on a stable subscription business that is not easily affected by fluctuations.

According to Leifeng.com, Gartner previously released a forecast that enterprise software spending is expected to grow by 8.3% in 2019, which is the fastest growing part of the information technology field. As for how long Microsoft can maintain its position as the world's number one market value, we can only keep an eye on it.

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