Microsoft surpasses Apple as most valuable US company
Microsoft eclipsed Apple as the world’s most valuable publicly traded company on Friday, as the latter struggles to reverse a downturn that drove the tech giant into a recent bear market.
Apple’s market capitalization is now about $847 billion, compared to Microsoft's $851 billion, according to the Associated Press. Microsoft edged past Apple -- whose shares fell nearly 20 percent in November, leading a tech rout that dragged the market down -- several times this week, but didn’t close in until Friday.
| Ticker | Security | Last | Change | Change % |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| AAPL | APPLE INC. | 167.04 | -0.96 | -0.57% |
| MSFT | MICROSOFT CORP. | 404.33 | -7.51 | -1.82% |
During its Nov. 1 earnings call, Apple officials warned that holiday sales would likely miss Wall Street’s expectations. They also said they’d no longer disclose the number of iPhone sales in quarterly reports, stoking investor concerns that sales would continue to decline.
According to Dow Jones data, Microsoft hasn’t held the title as the most valuable U.S. company since the dot-com boom in 2003. Under CEO Satya Nadella, the company has benefited from optimism about demand for cloud computing services, according to the Wall Street Journal, while fears about the impact of a trade war have hurt Apple.
Amazon and Microsoft have both dominated the cloud market: According to Synergy Research Group, Amazon controls more than 30 percent of the cloud infrastructure services market share, followed by Microsoft at 15 percent.
Last August, Apple became the first American company to hit $1 trillion market cap.