Microsoft fails x3 and yet their stock goes up?

[darkewaffle]

Their individual stock price is lower because they've split nine times vs Apples three and Google's zero. Essentially, there are more smaller pieces of the MSFT pie available versus fewer larger pieces of Apple pie.

I don't know that they pay a dividend regardless of performance, rather they just have never had a quarter so bad they wouldn't be able to pay one. But even if they did they would probably pay one anyway because they could cover it with their warchest and the investor confidence and "consistency" buzzword would likely benefit them in the long run.

 

[IGBT]

so if you have win7 skip win8 and hold out for win x ?

 

[Deeko]

Can someone please explain to me how dividend stocks work? How is MSFT able to consistently able to give stock holders dividend regardless of performance?

This is the crux of the problem with this thread. People like this and the OP seem blissfully unaware to how well Microsoft is actually doing. Microsoft makes billions of dollars every quarter. In fact, a year or two ago when they posted their first ever "loss", it wasn't even a real loss, it was an accounting loss - they had bought a company for a few billion years back who turned out to not be worth the cost, so they wrote off that purchase. In terms of cash-in-vs-cash-out, they still made a profit that quarter.

For example - the past quarter, ending in March 31, they had a $6.06 billion profit (not revenue). Up from $5.11 billion the same quarter in 2012. So - why is the stock price going up, the OP asks? Because the company is continuing to make a crap ton of profit, and they're doing so across the company, not just in Windows.

 

[rockyct]

so if you have win7 skip win8 and hold out for win x ?

Most of the rough edges of Win8 have been fixed in Windows 8 Blue. The release preview of the update will be out in a little over a week when they have their Build conference. The official Blue update will be out sometime in the fall.

 

[stlc8tr]

Regardless of what performance? MSFT consistently makes billions in profit. Even in the rare quarter where they might lose money, they literally have hundreds of billions in cash sitting in the bank.

Last report I saw said that MSFT had around ~$74B in cash and short term investments. A nice chunk of change but not hundreds of billions.

http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=MSFT+Key+Statistics

http://www.thestreet.com/story/11940073/2/mco-msft-sgen--outperforming-cash-rich-stocks.html