Lynch Picks: Buy Microsoft (MSFT)
On January 24, $MSFT published its most recent quarterly report. The tech giant's revenue for the second quarter of fiscal 2023, which concluded on December 31, 2022, increased by 2% year over year to $52.7 billion and outperformed expert expectations by $450 million. In addition, although its adjusted earnings per share dropped 6% to $2.32, it still beat Wall Street projections by $0.01.
Even if those growth rates were pitiful, Microsoft had previously informed investors that its fiscal 2023 growth would be slower as it dealt with macroeconomic and foreign exchange headwinds. In addition, in advance of the release of its second-quarter report, the company's intention to fire 10,000 workers, or 5% of its workforce, by the end of March helped to lower market anticipation.
The collaboration between Microsoft and OpenAI has already started to pay off. Earlier this month, the business declared that its Azure OpenAI service was generally accessible, enabling users to apply for access to, among other tools, the GPT-3 big language model AI, ChatGPT, DALL-E 2, an image-generation AI, and others.
Github Copilot, a tool powered by OpenAI that assists programmers by instantly recommending code and functions, has also been introduced. More than 1 million individuals have so far utilized GitHub Copilot. The business asserts to have the most potent cloud-based supercomputing infrastructure for AI.
Azure should continue to be the second-largest cloud infrastructure platform in the world after Amazon Web Services (AWS) for the foreseeable future. However, CFO Amy Hood cautioned that due to more significant macro headwinds.
Nevertheless, at 26.7 times forward earnings, Microsoft's stock is still attractive for long-term investors who can stomach short-term volatility.
Source: Yahoo Finance