Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) grew third-quarter sales and earnings faster than Wall Street had expected as it continued to enjoy strong demand for its cloud computing software and services.
Shares in the tech colossus climbed to a record high on Wall Street on Thursday, lifting its valuation firmly above US$1trn and making it, currently, the most valuable company in the world, above Apple Inc (NASDAQ:AAPL) at around US$970bn and Amazon.com Inc (NASDAQ:AMZN) at around US$940bn.
Having gained roughly 23% so far in 2019, Microsoft stock jumped another 4% to a record high of US$131.37.
Another change at the top of the most valuable companies in the world: #Microsoft hits $1 trillion market cap after earnings beat estimates https://t.co/GDoH6azgKq pic.twitter.com/BA6kEZ9cp8
— Holger Zschaepitz (@Schuldensuehner) April 24, 2019
Earnings per share of US$1.14 in the three months to 31 March were up 20% on the same quarter last year, as revenue swelled 14% to US$30.6bn, driven by a 41% increase in commercial cloud revenue to US$9.6bn. Net income was up 19% to US$8.8bn.
Analysts on the Street had pencilled in revenue of US$29.9bn, US$1 of EPS and net income of US$7.7bn, according to Bloomberg.
“Leading organizations of every size in every industry trust the Microsoft cloud,” said chief executive officer Satya Nadella, adding that the company was accelerating investment and innovation across the cloud and its Edge browser “so our customers can build the digital capability increasingly required to compete and grow.”
Analysts at Stifel said the cloud will continue to support future growth for Microsoft: “We continue to believe the shift to the cloud will be additive to Microsoft given a broader portfolio of products with deeper functionality as well as Microsoft’s ability to enter new categories where it did not compete previously.”