10 Stocks That Will Change the World

2. Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT)

Number of Hedge Fund Holders In Q1 2024: 293

Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) is one of the biggest technology companies in the world. It is also one of the key players in the artificial intelligence industry by having partnered up with OpenAI. Microsoft is investing heavily in artificial intelligence, and its capital expenditure sat at a whopping $55.7 billion for the June 2024 fiscal year. Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) benefits from its considerable enterprise computing market share through the Azure platform, which also provides it with a sizeable market to sell its AI products. At the same time, investor expectations for a return on its AI investments are high, and the firm’s earnings calls are often beset with weak share price movement as it continues to provide weak AI related returns. Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) is present on both our lists since the media believes that along with AI, it can also play a crucial role in the autonomous driving industry.

Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT)’s latest earnings call was one such event, where the shares only started to recover when management explained:

“For Intelligent Cloud we expect revenue to grow between 18% and 20% in constant currency, or US$28.6 billion to US$28.9 billion. Revenue will continue to be driven by Azure which, as a reminder, can have quarterly variability primarily from our per-user business and in-period revenue recognition depending on the mix of contracts. In Azure, we expect Q1 revenue growth to be 28% to 29% in constant currency. Growth will continue to be driven by our consumption business, inclusive of AI, which is growing faster than total Azure. We expect the consumption trends from Q4 to continue through the first half of the year. This includes both AI demand impacted by capacity constraints and non-AI growth trends similar to June. Growth in our per-user business will continue to moderate.

And in H2, we expect Azure growth to accelerate as our capital investments create an increase in available AI capacity to serve more of the growing demand. In our on-premises server business, we expect revenue to decline in the low single digits as continued hybrid demand will be more than offset by lower transactional purchasing. And in Enterprise and partner services, revenue should decline in the low single digits. In More Personal Computing, we expect revenue to grow between 9% and 12% in constant currency, or US$14.9 billion to US$15.3 billion. Windows OEM revenue growth should be relatively flat, roughly in line with the PC market. In Windows commercial products and cloud services, customer demand for Microsoft 365 and our advanced security solutions should drive revenue growth in the mid-single digits.”