Its 24th January and Microsoft is still the number one company in the world by Market capitalisation. Microsoft had two weeks achieved the 3 trillion-dollar status along with Apple and then briefly dropped backed to the $2.9tr territory and then Apple also in the $2.9tr region briefly topped Microsoft again towards the end of last week. This morning however at the start of the training the Redmond based giant is back to the top with a market cap of $3.02tr while Apple sits at $2.95tr.
Microsoft has made some heavy acquisitions in the last five years with the most recent being gaming giant Activision Blizzard for about $69b. The deal was recently concluded after the UK authorities gave a nod to the deal.
Apple became the first company in the world to hit the $3tr market status and sat on that throne for a while with stocks pulling back and forth over the last year but now it looks like there’s another kid on the block. Apple has recently suffered some setbacks in the number of iPhone 15 units sold and then the most recent issue with the Apple Watch Series 9 legal battle that has seen it remove the Blood Oxygen app from the device.
In the AI region that driven companies like Nvidia into the trillion-dollar market cap territory, Microsoft is a big player by publicly backing AI giants like OpenAI. Even when the surprised booting of CEO Sam Altman saga began, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella was quick to jump on it by providing an “independent” safe space within the Microsoft ecosystem for Sam Altman to thrive. Well Sam Altman returned after a week and of course the gesture was rewarded with Microsoft having some kind of say on the new board.
Microsoft has pushed into the cloud space aggressively by bringing the fight to AWS even if its still a distant second, but it is pushing hard and closing the gap. According to a 2022 Zdnet report, AWS still leads Azure among SMBs. However, even here Microsoft is closing the gap. AWS’s 69% share among SMBs was down from 72% last year versus Azure’s 59% share today, up from 48% last year. GCP’s share rose from 39% to 43% year on year. Oracle Cloud also won more SMBs and had a 28% share, up from 15%, while IBM was up from 20% to 24%.
Well Apple is also making its mark in the AI space and with the recent release of the Apple Vision Pro which Meta hopes would keep its $50b Metaverse dream alive, Apple may soon be back to $3tr and stay there for a while.