Satya Nadella has led a major transformation at Microsoft. Ever since Nadella replaced Ballmer, the company’s cloud business has flourished and the decision to focus on rival mobile platforms too worked in the company’s favour. While Microsoft could’ve been a trillion dollar company already if they could’ve made the company’s Windows mobile business a success.
Analytics now expect Microsoft to become a $1 trillion company by the end of the fiscal year 2021, or it might happen as early as 2020. The growth of cloud and other businesses would help the company reach a valuation of $1 trillion, claims analysts Daniel Greenfield Kirk Materne, Fenn Hoffman, Kirk Materne and Tom Mao.
The analysts also revealed that the growth would happen because of Microsoft Office 365 commercial and Azure public cloud businesses. Microsoft’s Office 365 consumer business will add $5.18 billion in revenue and the cloud business should achieve $22.19 billion in revenue.
“While we believe best in breed offerings such as Okta for IAM, Tableau /Qlik for BI/Analytics, Box /Dropbox for collaboration, or VMware AirWatch for EMM will maintain their respective leadership positions, on the margin, we expect Microsoft 365 to win incremental share over time due to its ease of integration with the broader Office productivity platform and enterprise customers’ proclivity to buy a ‘suite’ of products vs. best of breed solutions, especially in the SMB market where IT resources are scarce,” the team of analysts said.
Microsoft won’t be the first tech-focused company to become a $1 trillion business as Apple is also expected to achieve a $1 trillion market cap by 2018. The strong iPhone X sales helped Apple increase its valuation to $900 billion.
“As Azure’s revenue scales across a more fixed base of infrastructure investments, we believe Azure has the potential to drive meaningful operating leverage and FCF over the next 4 years and should ultimately reach 30%+ op. margins (vs. AWS at 25% today), to become one of Microsoft’s core earnings and FCF drivers over the next decade,” the analysts added.
