AAPL Apple Inc

By Amrith Ramkumar 

The $1 trillion club just got its third member: Microsoft Corp.

Shares of the Redmond, Wash., software firm surged as much as 5.1% to $131.37 in early trading Thursday to a new intraday high. That topped the $130.50 value needed to give the company a market value of $1 trillion, based on the firm's 7.663 billion shares outstanding.

The stock closed up 3.3% at $129.15, giving Microsoft a closing market cap of about $990 million.

With the rally, Microsoft joined fellow internet giants Apple Inc. and Amazon.com Inc. as the only U.S. companies to ever reach a $1 trillion market cap on an intraday basis. Apple and Amazon achieved the feat last summer before dropping below that level during the rout in technology stocks late last year.

The latest advance in Microsoft shares came after first-quarter results late Wednesday showed the company rode its cloud-computing business to another strong quarter and sales of its Windows operating system rebounded. The company posted a 14% increase in quarterly sales from a year earlier, a larger rise than analysts had expected.

Microsoft posted sales of $30.57 billion for the quarter, with revenue at the company's cloud-computing Azure arm surging 73% from a year earlier. Profits climbed nearly 19% and handily topped analyst targets.

"The company continues to execute on its core positioning in enabling its customers' digital transformation," Nomura Instinet analyst Christopher Eberle said in a note to clients. Nomura has a "buy" rating on Microsoft shares.

The Federal Reserve's cautious stance on interest rates has pushed investors back into the world's largest technology stocks, driving the tech-laden Nasdaq Composite to a new all-time high on Tuesday. The index inched closer to that record Thursday following upbeat results from Microsoft and Facebook Inc., which climbed 5.8%.

With global economic activity slowing, some investors say they are favoring companies such as Microsoft that can steadily lift sales. Shares of Microsoft have now risen 27% this year and 40% in the past 12 months.

Microsoft has been jockeying with Apple for the title of world's largest public company. Apple, which reports earnings next week, has a market cap of about $970 billion, while Amazon is valued at roughly $935 billion.

The e-commerce company posts its latest results after the market closes Thursday.

Write to Amrith Ramkumar at amrith.ramkumar@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

April 25, 2019 16:40 ET (20:40 GMT)

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