Microsoft becomes second US company to join £1.4 trillion club

TECH giant Microsoft became the second US company to join the exclusive $2 trillion (£1.4tn) club, beating Amazon, the Telegraph reported.

The Seattle-based software firm climbed just above the mark on Tuesday (22) backed by strong expectations for its booming cloud computing business.

Apple was the first US company to attain that position. It became the $1 tn (£718 billion) company in August 2018, and now has a market cap of about $2.2tn (£1.5tn).

Microsoft has been a key beneficiary of the Covid-induced changes. The company is likely to benefit further as key executives plan to extend remote and hybrid work.

Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella seems to be betting on permanently elevated demand for its Office 365, Teams software suites and Azure cloud computing service, the newspaper said.

Dan Ives at Wedbush Securities said, "With workforces expected to have a heavy remote focus, we believe the cloud shift is just beginning to take its next stage of growth globally."

"Naturally Amazon Web Services as well as Google and others (IBM) will benefit, as we predict enterprise workloads on the cloud increase from 40 per cent today to 45 per cent by the end of 2021 and 55 per cent by 2022 ... we estimate global cloud spending will approach $1tn (£718bn) over the next decade," he added.

Co-founded in 1975 by Bill Gates and Paul Allen, Microsoft created the personal-computer software industry. It dominated the market for PC operating systems and Office software for years.