Microsoft Pulls Ahead Of Amazon As Second-Most Valuable Tech Firm

Tech stocks – they used to feel like they were getting whipsawed. Now, they just feel like they go in one direction … down.

Despite the downdraft, there still is, as always, jockeying for position among value as measured by market capitalization. As of trading on Friday, and as noted by Financial Times, Microsoft had overtaken Amazon as the second most valuable tech firm by capitalization.

Apple still holds sway as the most valuable tech firm, with a market cap of over $1 trillion. Shares were down 1.6 percent on Friday. Microsoft’s market capitalization is $821 billion, and now Amazon trails a bit at $800 billion.

Microsoft, said FT, has been caught in the larger selloff, but also has seen its shares hold up a bit better than its tech brethren. Amazon, of course, dipped significantly after results posted Thursday, and where a disappointing outlook hit the stock by 7.8 percent on Friday and another few basis points after hours.

As reported, Microsoft beat estimates despite a slowdown in the growth rate of its Azure cloud operations. The company also announced a collaboration with SWIFT, the payments messaging firm, which will use Azure to shift SWIFT’s infrastructure into the cloud.

Beyond that, Amazon skidded on its earnings results, which showed that North American sales came in at $34.3 billion — and this was a 35 percent increase from last year. But international sales were sluggish, only up 13 percent year on year. Amazon also continues to lose money on international sales, but it is losing less money over time. As noted in this space, global losses were $385 million, compared to $936 million at this time last year. The company’s Q4 revenue guidance rattled investors, as the company said top line would be in the range of $66.5 billion to $72.5 billion, rising between 10 percent and 20 percent year on year and well below consensus estimates of $73.8 billion.