The coronavirus pandemic has accelerated changes in consumer habits and digitalization of companies, boosting the business of many technology players who have been providing the tools to make these changes possible. As a result, the following three technology stocks generated billions of investors in 2020.
1. Microsoft
This year, Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) paid $ 15.5 billion in dividends and repurchased $ 16.4 billion in shares. Still, these impressive figures pale compared to the company’s $ 493 billion rise in market value to $ 1.69 trillion, with the stock price rising 42% since the beginning of the year.
The technology giant has grown its public cloud infrastructure business, Microsoft Azure, to become a strong challenger for AmazonAmazon Web Services (AWS) from. Azure’s market share for cloud infrastructure services increased to 19% during the third quarter of 2020, up from 17% a year ago.
In addition, Microsoft has enjoyed tremendous success with its various corporate and consumer products, such as the Office 365 productivity suite and the Microsoft Teams collaboration solution. In addition, on-site shelter requests favored the consumption of the company’s game products and services.
Given its growing scale, Microsoft has improved its profitability in 2020. And with its large cash and cash equivalents exceeding its total debt by $ 74.4 billion at the end of the last quarter, shareholders can expect to receive extra billions in form of dividends and share buyback in the near future.
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2. Zoom in video communications
In contrast to Microsoft, the video communications specialist Zoom Video Communications (NASDAQ: ZM) did not pay dividends and did not buy back any shares during 2020. But shareholders earned billions just by holding shares throughout the year. The stock price increased by 501% during that period, which corresponds to an increase in the market value of US $ 98.2 billion.
As the need for remote communications increased during the coronavirus pandemic, consumers and businesses massively adopted Zoom’s simple, easy-to-use video communications platform. Given its sudden and unexpected success, the company faced several significant cybersecurity challenges during the first half of the year, but that did not scare users.
In addition to addressing its security concerns, the company has expanded its core video communications offering on a unified communications platform, in part thanks to its recent Zoom Phone offering. As an illustration, this year, the research group Gartner included Zoom for the first time in its magic quadrant for unified communications as a service, positioning the company as a leader based on its execution capacity and range of vision.
As a result of this strong execution, the number of Zoom customers with more than 10 employees increased 485% year-over-year to 433,700 during the last quarter, which led to a stellar year-on-year revenue growth from 367% to $ 777 million.
3. Apple
Even more impressive, Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) shareholders earned about $ 1 trillion in 2020. The company’s market capitalization has increased by $ 954 billion, or 80%, since the beginning of the year. In addition, shareholders received $ 14.1 billion in dividends, and the company spent $ 52.5 billion on share repurchases until the end of September.
Despite the closure of many stores for several months because of the pandemic, Apple recorded excellent results throughout the year. In particular, the number of paid subscriptions on all services increased 135 million in one year to 585 million at the end of the last quarter, which led to record all-time revenue from the app store, cloud services, music, advertising and payment Services.
Thanks to its impressive results in its service and wearable, household and accessory segments, Apple has become less risky as it has reduced its dependence on the iPhone. During the last quarter, the company’s main product represented 41% of total sales, compared to 53% in the previous year’s quarter.
Given Apple’s multi-billion dollar quarterly earnings and $ 79.4 billion in cash, cash equivalents and marketable securities that exceed total debt at the end of the last quarter, shareholders should expect significant dividends and share repurchases to continue in the future. . In fact, management is aiming to bring the company’s net debt to zero in the long run.