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This is Scott Becker with the Becker Business and the Becker Private Equity Podcast. Today's discussion is can Microsoft rebound? Three quick points. So here's the deal. Of the magnificent seven, Microsoft is down the most year to date. It's down almost 18% year to date. So I'm an investor in Microsoft directly. And so the question is, which is, you know, by nature I'm not a, I'm not an emotional person. So I'm very good at holding and not selling stocks when they're under pressure. I'm very good at keeping my line and allocation and not being impulsive at the same time because I, by nature I'm an emotional investor. I do worry, even though I try not to act on the worry. So this is forced me to look closer at is Microsoft still worth holding? And here's the concept that you come up with when people look at where Microsoft, where Microsoft is at and whether or not Microsoft is screwed. So, so here's the gist of this. The core business at Microsoft remains incredibly strong. Quarterly revenues this past quarter were up 17%. They reached almost 82 billion. Second, Azure cloud revenues, which is really the reason I invested in Microsoft to begin with, is because of their Azure strength, just like investing in Amazon, because their AWS strength is up 39% over the last quarter, driven a lot by essentially, you know, AI generation and what's going on with the cloud they now generate through Microsoft Cloud, almost 50 billion a quarter. So that's not a company that's in trouble, it's a company that's scaling. Now why is its stock getting killed? Its stock is getting killed for really two reasons. First, it is putting tremendous capital spending into AI infrastructure. It has jumped its investment in AI stuff by 66%. Data centers, GPUs and chips are costing tens of billions annually. And, and, and ultimately investors are worried that all that spending might not justify or lead to the profits they want it to lead to. So that's sort of the question. Microsoft says it's a little bit like their early cloud build out where they did massive spending before profits. We'll see if it, if it works or not. But revenues are still going great. Spending has increased tremendously. At the end of the day, Microsoft still is really well positioned in the, in the AI world. In the cloud race, AUR is the number two cloud platform globally and still growing, fast growing 40% over the last quarter. Three and a half 40%. AI is integrated across Microsoft, 365, Azure, Windows and Copilot. And they also have partnerships with OpenAI and Anthropic diversifying its AI strategy. So at the end of the day, the bottom line is longer term. Microsoft should be fine. It's not broken. It should be okay. I shouldn't panic and panic sell my Microsoft shares. Although there's days where I think that I want to. It is what it is. Thank you for listening to the Becker business and the Becker Private Equity podcast. And God bless you for listening. And thank you to Chanel Bunger, our won wonderful producer. Thank you very much.
