Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, delivered a speech on the Squawk box of CNBC in the Davos World Economic Forum, Switzerland on January 22, 2025.
Gerry Miller | CNBC
Microsoft It is between artificial intelligence prosperity, but it has been some time since investors have seen these returns.
In the past year, the stock price of the software giant is less than 8 %. This is by far the weakest income among the eight American technology giant companies. apple The next minimum growth rate is 19 %, followed by letter Account for 26 %. All others rose at least 48 %, and Tesla It is the best person in the group, which has increased by 117 %.
Microsoft also lags far behind Nasdaq, which has increased by 25 % over the past year.
This is the background of entering the Microsoft quarterly revenue report on Wednesday. The company is starting the technical income season, Yuan And Tesla. Apple follows, letters and letters and letters Amazon Report next week.
The biggest problem of Microsoft shareholders revolves around the company’s Azure cloud computing business and whether it will show accelerated growth.
October, Microsoft Tell investors Due to the delay of third -party providers, the demand for Azure services exceeds supply. Amy Hood, the person in charge of finance, said that she still foresees that in the first half of 2025, Azure’s growth rate will increase, but in the December quarter, she called for an increase in constant currencies by 31 % to 32 %. A lower time than the previous 34 %. The next day, Microsoft’s stock fell 6 %.
Since the last quarter of 2023, Azure has increased by 2 percentage points. At the same time, the top competitors Amazon and the alphabet saw the growth of clouds accelerated 7 points and 13 points, respectively. This is a particularly important issue for investors, because Microsoft has a quarterly quarterly capital expenditure of tens of billions of dollars to meet customers’ cloud and artificial intelligence needs.
The Microsoft spokesman did not comment.
Microsoft operates in many other markets. However, investors first attracted the cloud, because it was a considerable category. As the company continued to get rid of and operates its own data centers and increase higher workload, it was still expanding rapidly.
Overall, according to LSEG data, Microsoft is expected to report revenue by 11 % to $ 68.8 billion. This will marked the slowest year -on -year growth in any quarter since mid -2023. Analysts predict that the income per share will increase from $ 2.93 a year ago to $ 3.11.
Investors’ views on Microsoft in 2023 are even more optimistic, and stocks have risen by more than 50 %, which is the best year since 2009. The driving force is the intimate relationship between Microsoft and the ChatGPT Creator Openai, which has triggered the Generation AI BOOM and led to historic investment growth.
Microsoft is the leader of Openai Nearly $ 14 billion Enter AI to start. Through partnerships, Microsoft has obtained a large number of cloud business, but it also costs a lot to establish an infrastructure.
relation Change Last week, Microsoft stated that OpenAI would no longer use Azure exclusively unless it involves the introduction of developers’ inquiries. Looking forward to the future, OpenAI must check with Microsoft when seeking more computing power, and Microsoft will be able to accept or refuse requests.
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itself Blog postOpenai calls Microsoft as a technical partner, but it is not a group member of the group who will build and operate Stargate. The group may make a $ 500 billion investment. Microsoft Stubborn In the year of June 30, the capital expenditure related to AI was 80 billion US dollars. Most of them are targeted Nvidia’s Graphic processing unit or GPU.
COWEN analysts wrote in a report that the development of the situation last week can help Microsoft re -join the Azure growth rate in the mid -1930s. They said that Microsoft has been “investing in the OpenAI model training for the GPU Capex, but does not collect income”, and by pushing some of them to other places, the company can “show the improved Capex efficiency and stronger capital expenditure of Capex and stronger capital expenditure In return, while maintaining its access permissions Openai.
Kevin Walkush, the investment group manager of Jensen Investment Management, said he expects that AI investment will return in the long run.
Walkush said: “If AI does not appear, the cloud is still long.” “But I think the opportunity of AI is really high, so this is a bet that I am willing to use this opportunity.”