Microsoft just reminded everyone why it’s in the conversation for most valuable company on the planet. After posting fiscal Q4 results that cleared the bar by a wide margin, shares jumped more than 15% on July 30, dragging the broader market higher with them and rewriting the record books in the process.
The single-day gain added roughly $450 billion to Microsoft’s market capitalization. It’s the largest one-day market cap increase for any U.S. corporation in history, and it happened because a cloud business kept doing what clouds apparently do best: rain money.
The numbers that moved markets
Total revenue for the quarter came in at $90 billion, up 18% from the same period last year. Net income climbed 31% to $35.8 billion.
The star of the show was the Intelligent Cloud segment. Azure and other cloud services posted 43% year-over-year growth, pushing the segment past $100 billion in annual revenue for the first time.
