Following last night’s quarterly financial report from Microsoft, the company’s stock hit a new all-time high today in after-hours trading. The share price is up by nearly 6% at the time of writing, hitting $60.63, surpassing the previous record set back in 1999 at the height of the dot com bubble.
Despite offering a sort of mixed bag in yesterday’s earnings call, investors came out happy with Microsoft’s performance over the last financial quarter. The company saw large declines in its phone business, and flat earnings in the OEM licensing and Windows division, but it beat market expectations on its Cloud, Office, and Enterprise offerings, all of which are deemed vital for the company’s future.
For years now, Microsoft has been in a transitional state as the company has tried to pivot from the declining PC market, which it’s still dominating, to more service- and cloud-based approaches that are expected to dominate the next decades in the world of technology.
With every passing quarter, under the tutelage of Nadella, Microsoft has managed to build up its cloud infrastructure and SAAS offerings. Just this past quarter, for example, Azure revenue increased by a whopping 116% compared to the same time last year.
With a PC market that’s only expected to stabilize in the next few years, and new paradigms such as intelligent services and cloud computing becoming ever more important, Microsoft will likely continue its transitional phase for a while. However, the company now seems to be much better positioned than it was only a few years ago, finally finding its footing in this new “mobile first, cloud first” world.