Microsoft Corp has surpassed Apple Inc as the world’s most valuable publicly traded company.
As other tech giants stumble, Microsoft’s steady resilience is paying off. Under chief executive officer Satya Nadella, Microsoft has found stability by focusing on software and services over the Internet, or the cloud, with long-term business contracts. The personal-computing powerhouse is now having a renaissance moment as it eclipses Facebook Inc, Google, Amazon.com Inc and the other tech darlings.
Apple had been the world’s most prosperous firm since claiming the top spot from Exxon Mobil Corp earlier this decade. Microsoft eclipsed Apple briefly a few times this week, but did not close on top until Friday, with a market value of US$851 billion to Apple’s US$847 billion.
Microsoft had not been at the top since the height of the dotcom boom in 2000. Microsoft became a contender again in large part because Apple’s stock fell nearly 20 percent last month, while Microsoft has not done any worse than the rest of the stock market.
However, the fact that it has not done poorly is a reflection of its steady focus on business customers in recent years.
Microsoft lost its luster as people were shunning PCs in favor of smartphones. In 2013, PC sales plunged 10 percent to about 315 million, the worst year-to-year drop ever, according to research firms Gartner Inc and International Data Corp.
It did not help that Microsoft’s effort to make PCs more like phones, Windows 8, was widely panned.
However, a turnaround began when the Redmond, Washington-based company promoted Nadella as CEO in 2014. He succeeded longtime CEO Steve Ballmer, who initially scoffed at the notion that people would be willing to pay US$500 or more for Apple’s iPhones.
That bet paid off.
Windows is now a dwindling fraction of Microsoft’s business. While it still runs consumer-focused businesses such as Bing search and Xbox gaming, it has prioritized business-oriented services such as its Office line of e-mail and other workplace software, as well as newer additions such as LinkedIn and Skype.
However, Microsoft’s biggest growth has happened in the cloud, particularly the cloud platform it calls Azure. Cloud computing now accounts for more than one-quarter of the firm’s revenue and Microsoft rivals Amazon as a leading provider of such services.
Wedbush Securities Inc analyst Dan Ives said Azure is still in its early days, meaning there is plenty of room for growth, especially considering the company’s large customer base for Office and other products.
“While the tech carnage seen over the last month has been brutal, shares of [Microsoft] continue to hold up like the Rock of Gibraltar,” Ives said.
Being less reliant on consumer demand helped shield Microsoft from holiday season turbulence and US-China trade jitters affecting Apple and other tech companies.
US President Donald Trump amplified those tariff concerns when he told the Wall Street Journal in a story published on Monday that new tariffs could affect iPhones and laptops imported from China.
Daniel Morgan, senior portfolio manager for Synovus Trust Co, said Microsoft is outperforming its tech rivals in part because of what it is not.
It does not face as much regulatory scrutiny as advertising-hungry Google and Facebook, which have attracted controversy over their data-harvesting practices. Unlike Netflix Inc, it is not on a hunt for a diminishing number of international subscribers and while Amazon also has a strong cloud business, it is still more dependent on online retail, Morgan said.
Intel Corp chief executive officer Lip-Bu Tan (陳立武) is expected to meet with Taiwanese suppliers next month in conjunction with the opening of the Computex Taipei trade show, supply chain sources said on Monday. The visit, the first for Tan to Taiwan since assuming his new post last month, would be aimed at enhancing Intel’s ties with suppliers in Taiwan as he attempts to help turn around the struggling US chipmaker, the sources said. Tan is to hold a banquet to celebrate Intel’s 40-year presence in Taiwan before Computex opens on May 20 and invite dozens of Taiwanese suppliers to exchange views
Application-specific integrated circuit designer Faraday Technology Corp (智原) yesterday said that although revenue this quarter would decline 30 percent from last quarter, it retained its full-year forecast of revenue growth of 100 percent. The company attributed the quarterly drop to a slowdown in customers’ production of chips using Faraday’s advanced packaging technology. The company is still confident about its revenue growth this year, given its strong “design-win” — or the projects it won to help customers design their chips, Faraday president Steve Wang (王國雍) told an online earnings conference. “The design-win this year is better than we expected. We believe we will win
Power supply and electronic components maker Delta Electronics Inc (台達電) yesterday said it plans to ship its new 1 megawatt charging systems for electric trucks and buses in the first half of next year at the earliest. The new charging piles, which deliver up to 1 megawatt of charging power, are designed for heavy-duty electric vehicles, and support a maximum current of 1,500 amperes and output of 1,250 volts, Delta said in a news release. “If everything goes smoothly, we could begin shipping those new charging systems as early as in the first half of next year,” a company official said. The new
SK Hynix Inc warned of increased volatility in the second half of this year despite resilient demand for artificial intelligence (AI) memory chips from big tech providers, reflecting the uncertainty surrounding US tariffs. The company reported a better-than-projected 158 percent jump in March-quarter operating income, propelled in part by stockpiling ahead of US President Donald Trump’s tariffs. SK Hynix stuck with a forecast for a doubling in demand for the high-bandwidth memory (HBM) essential to Nvidia Corp’s AI accelerators, which in turn drive giant data centers built by the likes of Microsoft Corp and Amazon.com Inc. That SK Hynix is maintaining its
RSS