Microsoft has officially joined the $2 trillion club.
On Tuesday, the company briefly became the second in the U.S. to reach a $2 trillion market value after its shares rose 1.2% in New York, only to fall just pennies short of the threshold at close. The valuation makes Microsoft second only to Apple, which achieved the milestone in 2020. Globally, the only other company to achieve such a market value is Saudi Aramco, the world’s biggest oil company, which reached a $2 trillion valuation in December of 2019.
Microsoft has continued to assert its dominance in cloud computing and software in recent months, and announced last week that CEO Satya Nadella had been unanimously voted in as chairman of the board after helping to steward the company to those successes while simultaneously navigating the challenges associated with Covid-19. As the pandemic shuttered offices and sent consumers into lockdown, Microsoft weathered the storm by buffing up its line of meeting software and modernizing its cloud-based applications, in addition to allowing employees greater flexibility in terms of their ability to work remotely.
Hilary Frisch, senior research analyst at Clearbridge Investments, told Bloomberg that Microsoft’s recent financial success makes a lot of sense, given that the company “has its hands in a lot and it is doing it all well: gaming, cloud, automation, analytics, AI,” she said. “It is an attractively valued name within tech, and it should benefit from both the economy reopening as well as from a more pronounced shift toward the cloud.”
Although Microsoft and Apple are the only U.S.-based members of the $2 trillion club, things might not stay that way for long: Amazon and Alphabet Inc. are both knocking at the door, with market caps of nearly $1.8 trillion and $1.6 trillion, respectively.