While social distancing became a common thing to do, and markets are sinking into a bear market for the past couple of weeks, for Microsoft, social distancing seems to be a good thing. Since the lockdown, more and more people and companies are using one of Microsoft's hubs: the Teams app.
Microsoft is one of the biggest providers of cloud services, and during these challenging times, usage increased substantially. The sudden expansion puts the company in a position where it needs to find a new center space for data storage.
One of the most significant Teams userbases is found in Italy, as it is one of the most affected countries in Europe. In one of its posts, Microsoft said that in Italy the usage increased by 775%. In total, Microsoft announced that Teams had a "very significant spike" in usage, as seen on cnbc.com. In only one week, the number of users increased from 12 million to 44 million. The number of Skype users also grew by 70% in just one month, to 40 million daily active users.
Of course, the company had its of Coronavirus pandemic induced chaos. It managed to recover fast, jumping 20% from $132.52 to $160.23 on Monday. Jim Cramer from CNBC said that "Microsoft might be the best tech stock in this market."
Microsoft has some competition in the market. The share price for Apple's Zoom increased by around 50% during the last month. It seems that schools and businesses are trying to get a hold of their videoconferencing tools. People forced to work from home made the usage increase by 300%, says Sterling Auty from JP Morgan. The Zoom app is available to download for free from the App Store.
One of Amazon’s spokespersons said that they are “taking measures to prepare, and we are confident we will be able to meet customer demands for capacity in response to COVID-19.” Share prices went up 2.2%.
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Sources: marketwatch.com, cnbc.com, datacenterfrontier.com
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