Pandemic helps propel Microsoft’s $2T market capitalization

The news: Microsoft is now the second US public company to reach a $2 trillion market value, per Bloomberg, joining a very exclusive club it shares with Apple, which made history by reaching the milestone last summer.

More on this: Microsoft’s shares and value have been boosted by the pandemic as lockdowns propelled the global shift to remote work and learning. The pandemic also saw unprecedented adoption of cloud services where Microsoft is the second-largest player behind AWS. Early this year, Microsoft reported that revenues from Azure increased 50% YoY. In terms of productivity solutions, Microsoft continued to see increased adoption of its Teams conferencing service, which now has more than 145 million daily active users.

The bigger picture: Microsoft divides its business into three reportable segments—productivity and business processes, personal computing, and intelligent cloud. Microsoft’s stock price has surged nearly 60% since the US imposed lockdowns last spring. Clearly, its product and services diversification is paying dividends. Microsoft’s success is also notable in that it is dominating while also avoiding the global antitrust scrutiny that’s currently bearing down on its Big Tech rivals. Microsoft is no stranger to this dilemma, it battled through its own antitrust case decades ago, which it lost after a long and messy trial.