Earlier this week, we reported that the Microsoft had overtaken Apple briefly, during the NASDAQ announcement, as the most valuable company in the world. At the close of the day, however, Apple was still ahead and this was repeated every day, until yesterday.
Today, officially, Microsoft has once again become the most valuable publicly traded company in the world resuming the post stolen by Apple itself eight years ago.
The $ AAPL closed this Friday down 0.54%, now quoted at $ 178.58, while the $ MSFT rose 0.64% and ended the day at $ 110.89. Obviously, these are the individual values of their roles; multiplying them by the number of shares of each available on the market, we reach market values of respectively $ 847.4 billion and $ 851.2 billion that is, Microsoft ended the week worth almost $ 4 billion more than Apple.
As we cover here and here, Apple's shares have plummeted sharply in recent weeks due to rumors of iPhones sales below expectations, coupled with the fact that from its next financial results the company will no longer detail sales of iPhones, iPads and Macs per unit by recipe only.
Microsoft, meanwhile, has been on an almost steady growth from 2014 to c when Satya Nadella took over as CEO of the Redmond giant. His gesture has been highly praised and this turn of events market cap, although symbolic, one more fact that corroborates the good work he has been doing as a manager. O New York Times has a great article about this successful trajectory, for those interested.
When Apple surpassed Microsoft in market value on May 26, 2010, they have not fought for the post yet. We'll see how it goes over the next few weeks.
