50% off Premium Yearly
Microsoft CorpMSFTDON'T BUYMay 02, 2017Stock price when the opinion was issued
As of Jun 22, 2026. Market Open.
Not a value company, but has become a "utility" style company due large scale adoption of products. Very strong product suite with high margins. Excellent management team. 30x earnings per / share hard to justify, but strong dividend and excellent balance sheet. Would recommend holding, or buying on weakness.
Hit record high earlier today. Makes sense especially with exposure to AI space. Cloud business is growing, subscriptions keep the money flowing. Not cheap now at 33.5x, growing at 15x, 2x PEG. Forward price to sales a bit high at 11x.
In all the right spaces and doing the right things. Hold. Be careful adding, as tech did so well last year.
MSFT is expected to grow in the mid-teens on the top-line over the next few years and trades at a forward P/E of 30.9. It trades at a premium, as it shoulld. With that said, we think the bar is high for above-average share price growth at MSFT. They are very large, being scrutinized on acquisitons, not cheap and have had a strong run in the last year. We think it is a name an investor can still do fine with over the long-term, but we might not expect 'fireworks' here either.
Unlock Premium - Try 5i Free
IBM lacks the spread of clientele like MSFT. Also, IBM has been getting rid of their hardware business, focusing more on software with AI. In terms of quality, MSFT is better (customer loyalty, Office Suite) while IBM is inferior, offering little growth. IBM isn't a big player moving forward. Among megatech, MSFT is the top.
This has been on a valuation ladder. For a lot of years it was the darling as a high, high growth company, and deservedly so with a very high multiple. Then it went out of favour and earnings didn’t grow as fast, and it went down the ladder on valuation, to what would now be described as old tech, trading in a low teen multiple. It is now back up the ladder, but in anticipation of new things happening. Some of those new things are happening, but haven’t shown up yet on the income statement. We are really not seeing earnings growth, the way you would expect for a company trading at the multiple it is trading at. He would step aside on this.