With Amazon following in the footsteps of Apple by reaching the $1 trillion market cap milestone earlier this week, the question remains: who will take bronze and be the third trillion-dollar company?
The two main contenders in this race seem to be Alphabet Inc (GOOGL), with a market cap of $815 billion, and Microsoft Corp (MSFT), with a market cap of $830 billion.
Ray Wang, the founder of Constellation Research, thinks that Google will cross the $1 trillion mark first.
“Google’s gone away from just being a one-trick pony on search,” Wang said. “You’re looking at a huge run-up on Google Enterprise. When we talk to our clients, almost all of them are considering Google as well as part of their cloud. The cloud part of their business is going to be their fastest-growing piece, and they’re taking share from Amazon. So as companies start moving to the cloud – look, only 7 to 10% of the world’s workloads are in the cloud today, and there’s a lot of upside as there’s a fight and a battle for who’s got cloud dominance.”
On the other hand, others think Microsoft will eventually be the third company to cross $1 trillion.
The Financial Times’s Tom Braithwaite looks back through Microsoft’s long history, noting that while they’ve done a pretty bad job staying ahead of the curve with new tech trends, they’ve had some solid success with their cloud services.
David Borun of Zacks Investment Research has similar thoughts. He examines Microsoft’s “lost decade,” when former CEO Steve Ballmer led the company through several unsuccessful ventures, including video games and e-books. However, he says current CEO Satya Nadella has done a good job re-focusing Microsoft on its core businesses, while expanding its cloud and data protection services.
Right behind Google and Microsoft are Berkshire Hathaway Inc (BRK.B), with a market cap of $530 billion and a larger-than-life CEO in his late 80s, and Facebook Inc (FB), with a market cap of $470 billion and still reeling from allegations of user data misuse and election interference. Given their current market caps and trends, these companies would have to cover some serious ground to surpass Google or Microsoft on the road to $1 trillion.
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