Microsoft (MSFT)
By: Conner D. Thiry
MSFT Background
Microsoft was made by the founders, Bill Gates and Paul Allen. They founded the company on April 4th of 1975 and later it was incorporated on June 25th of 1981. The CEO of the company is a man by the name of Satya Nadella. The company was very successful and had many sub-companies such as Skype Technologies, Winternals, Rare Ltd., Razorfish, Avanade, Sucker Punch Productions, Lionhead Studios, and much more. Microsoft has a big challenge in the industry that they compete in since it is the Business Software and Services. They have to compete against big companies such as Apple, Google, and Oracle.
MSFT Factors of Production
Microsoft has many products and services, such as the popular Xbox. They also own Skype, Bing, Outlook.com, Microsoft Azure, and much more stuff. To get all the stuff done they need a big group of workers and they do. Microsoft's headcount worldwide is a total of 122,935 and as a breakout it is 70.8% male and 29.1% female. The net worth of the company (sometimes brought up as market capitalization) for the company is at an all time high of $230 billion (if you think that is a lot go and look at Apple)
MSFT Financial Information
Since 2010 this has been Microsoft's profit/loss. Starting at $18.76 billion in 2010, rocketing up to the highest price of $23.15 billion in 2011, then dropping to an all time low in 2012 at $16.98 billion, in 2013 it got up to $21.86 billion, and finally in 2014 the price made it to $22.07 billion. If I had to comment on the chart of these annual prices I would say they would be doing pretty good because of the fact, they may have went down for one year in 2012 but it began to rise since then up back up into the 20 billions.
MSFT Stock Information
The symbol of Microsoft has been brought up in the writing many times already, it is MSFT and something extra for everyone to know is that Microsoft trades in the NASDAQ stock exchange. The stocks through the last year ( 52 week hi/low ) have been at a high of $50.045 B / and a low of $37.5058 B. Now trading today compared to the last 52 week hi/low is $40.76 B today which is directly in between the prices of the high and the low price. Next there will be a graph below to show about the last 5 years of stock, the last split that Microsoft had was quite a long time ago, it was on February 18th, of 2003 and the ratio of it was a 2 for 1. (The 2 for 1 split means for each share Microsoft owned pre-split, the shareholder will now have two owned shares). After all of that is the total amount of shares Microsoft has now, today they have a total of 8.204 B shares. The company does have dividends and per share they pay $0.31 which is pretty reasonable, and the last time they had to pay a dividend was March 12th, on the year of 2015 and there next upcoming one will be June 11th, 2015. Reviews from others have been shown on glassdoor.com that Microsoft has gotten 3.8 stars out of 5 and a comment from someone had said, "really good work, life balance compared to other tech companies of the same caliber".
MSFT News Releases
On May 31st, 2012 Microsoft was said to have become the most interesting stock in the world. They had become this because of the reason 1. Microsoft extended their desktop dominance into phones, online services, tablets and social networking, 2. Microsoft loses, and becomes vulnerable to desktops using other operating systems such as Apple's Macs and Google's Chromebooks. Finally 3. Meh. Users resist upgrading, and we go on as we have been. Next article is Bill Gates sells 90 million Microsoft shares, his main reason for doing this was because of SEC filings (Security and Exchange Commission).
MSFT Summary, Analysis, Reflection
By the end after seeing all this information about Microsoft I would definitely still buy it. So far in the game I have a loss of $2597.52 or -2.6%. Finally what I have learned about investing is that if you see a company in your stocks that is doing bad but used to do good do not give up on it so easily. Before you know it you will make money from that stock.