Tech giant Microsoft has surpassed Apple to become the world’s most valuable publicly traded company. Microsoft briefly claimed the top spot on Monday, and its shares rose 0.6 per cent on Tuesday, pushing the company’s market value to $828.1 billion at the close. Both the companies are trading back and forth for the title.
While Apple’s stock has witnessed great growth over the past five years, making it the first company to have a market capitalisation of $1 trillion earlier this year, its investors are concerned about iPhone sales which still make up nearly 60 per cent of Apple’s entire revenue.
Microsoft’s market value was over $1 billion more than the value of Apple, which has declined this month due to poor iPhone sales. According to media reports, the last time Microsoft’s market capitalisation was bigger than Apple was in 2010.
Over the past few years, Microsoft has been behind Apple as computing shifted from desktop machines to mobile devices like iPhones, making Microsoft’s PC dominance less relevant. The company’s further attempts to regain its foothold by acquiring Nokia’s handset business and releasing its own phones also did not improved market value much.
But, Microsoft’s luck changed when Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella invested heavily in data centres to run applications and store data for corporate customers which in turn gave rise to Microsoft’s cloud computing platform.
Earlier this year, Microsoft has surpassed both Google and Amazon in market cap value in the cloud computing business. Microsoft failed in the mobile business, but the company risen back focusing on cross-platform technologies, the cloud, and artificial intelligence.
