Microsoft (MS) has been named the second corporation in the world to surpass a corporate value of $4 trillion as of the 31st (local time).
On this day, MS's intraday stock price surged over 8% compared to the previous day, reaching $555.45. As a result, its market capitalization exceeded $4 trillion, rising to $4.1 trillion. This marks the first time MS has surpassed the $4 trillion mark since it was founded 50 years ago by Bill Gates and Paul Allen. Among corporations globally, it follows only the artificial intelligence (AI) leader NVIDIA, which surpassed the $4 trillion mark on the 9th.
Since breaking through a market capitalization of $3 trillion in January last year, MS has inflated its market cap by another $1 trillion in just 1.5 years. The Wall Street Journal noted that MS has continuously strived to maintain its dominance in the computing services and office software sectors over the past 50 years. In its early days, MS secured market dominance by obtaining licenses for the disk operating system (DOS) bundled with popular personal computers from IBM, and then rapidly grew with the Windows operating system. The Windows operating system is installed on more than 1 billion devices and has established itself in various fields, including gaming, hardware, and enterprise solutions.
Above all, the institutional sector that propelled MS to a new peak is cloud computing. As the trend of corporations transitioning from local servers to cloud services gained momentum in the 2010s, MS made large-scale investments in cloud infrastructure, turning Azure into a strong competitor against the leading cloud service Amazon Web Services (AWS).
In its earnings announcement the previous day, MS revealed that its cloud service Azure's annual sales have surpassed $7.5 billion, marking a 34% increase compared to the previous year. This has narrowed the gap with AWS's projected 2024 sales of $10.76 billion. Recently, Azure's growth has accelerated due to explosive demand for AI services. Azure offers various AI functionalities used by corporations like Meta Platforms and OpenAI, and the number of customers continues to increase.
Amy Hood, the Chief Financial Officer (CFO), stated during a conference call following the earnings announcement that "capital expenditures for the first quarter of the 2025 fiscal year (July to September) are expected to exceed $30 billion," and added, "annual revenue growth is also forecasted to be in double digits." Additionally, Azure is expected to grow by 37% in the first quarter, surpassing market expectations.
However, on this day, MS's stock price reduced its gains due to profit-taking from the rapid increase, closing at $533.50, up 3.95% from the previous day. Its market cap also shrank to $3.965 trillion, falling below the $4 trillion mark.