From time to time I profile companies in emorningcoffee.com. I have covered both Tesla and Netflix in the past. Most of the companies I write about will be in the news for one reason or another or will be “down the middle” large cap names. Of course, you can find loads of information on most of these companies’ websites and on the web generally about them. Moreover, many brokerage firms, substantially better resourced than me, have teams of research professionals that provide much more thorough analysis than I am able to provide. In fact, consider these write-ups to be tasters only, written to introduce you to whichever company I am writing about.
For the avoidance of doubt, I am not an investment advisor and am not licensed to provide investment advice. The information I am presenting is generally believed to be true, but much was obtained from third-party sites like Yahoo Finance. These are not buy or sell recommendations. These are ideas regarding companies only, and any decisions you make to invest in them, are your own. I currently own Microsoft shares.
Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) is a leading technology, software and infrastructure company, based in Redmond, Washington. The company has over 148,000 employees globally. It is the largest company in the world by market capitalisation ($1.17 trillion) and is rated Aaa/AAA. The company released its 2Q2020 results on January 29th 2020, and you can find the press release here. The company provides its quarterly financial statements in an Excel spreadsheet which you can access here. Microsoft presents its revenues by segments (three) which are close to one another in terms of revenues. The strongest growth of the three segments during 1H2020 was Intelligent Cloud services segment (up 27%), and the weakest was in Personal Computing (up 2%, with laggards being Surface sales (+6%) and XBox (-11%)). Microsoft also owns LinkedIn which has experienced strong revenue growth. The company issued a press release on February 26th announcing that the Personal Computer segment would miss its original guidance due to COVID-19. Below is a financial summary, followed by 2-year and 20-year+ share graphs and some commentary.
The graph below is the performance of Microsoft shares over the last two years.
The graph below provides a much longer perspective, looking at the share performance over the last 20+ years (containing the share history dating back to before the dot.com bust (2000) and including the Great Recession (2007-2009).
What I like about Microsoft:
Things to watch out for:
