Microsoft's market cap leaps over Apple's, now the world's most valuable company: Now official

Microsoft’s current market cap has overtaken Apple’s, after living for nearly a decade in the shadow of the Cupertino company.

At the time of writing Microsoft’s intra-day Market Cap is now 751.88B, higher than competing company Apple Inc. which is now 749.75B, by more than 2 billion dollars.

Amazon (currently 741.90B) and Apple were dubbed the world’s most valuable tech companies by Market Cap earlier this year as they crossed the $1 trillion mark. With Microsoft now overshadowing all three, including Alphabet Inc, the firm now looks to be the most valuable tech company of the Silicon Valley giants.

As can be seen from the graph above, the last time Apple and Microsoft’s market capitalization came close to each other was way back in 2010.

Investors are concerned about slowing revenue growth at the so-called FANG companies (Facebook, Apple, Netflix and Google), a club of high flyers Microsoft has traditionally been excluded from.

Now they are betting company spending on cloud services and software will remain strong as companies strive to increase efficiency and productivity, while Facebook and Google are increasingly coming under scrutiny for their consumer data practices.

Microsoft’s cloud segment, in particular, is expected to do well, with Office 365 the lead programs in the market for cloud-based productivity tools, while Azure services for storing data and running apps in the cloud is in a solid second position to Amazon’s AWS. Microsoft is also increasingly relying on a steady subscription business which is less subject to volatility.

Spending on enterprise software is expected rise 8.3 percent in 2019, the fastest growing segment within information technology, according to projections from Gartner Inc.

It remains to be seen if Microsoft will maintain the gains until the end of the trading day, but even this result is a validation of the company’s productivity focus, which is currently the so-called North Star of the Seattle company.

Update: Microsoft managed to maintain their lead at the end of the 23rd November trading day, making the achievement official.

Update 2: There has been some dispute regarding the numbers due to Apple having outstanding shares, but today further declines in Apple’s stock market valuation has made Microsoft’s position over Apple official, as confirmed by BusinessInsider.

Thanks for the tip, Patrick De Mesa!