MSFT - Microsoft Corporation
| Previous Close | 151.36 |
| Open | 151.29 |
| Bid | 151.00 x 1400 |
| Ask | 151.49 x 800 |
| Day's Range | 150.77 - 151.89 |
| 52 Week Range | 93.96 - 152.50 |
| Volume | 16,481,060 |
| Avg. Volume | 22,263,964 |
| Market Cap | 1.2T |
| Beta (3Y Monthly) | 1.23 |
| PE Ratio (TTM) | 28.52 |
| EPS (TTM) | 5.30 |
| Earnings Date | Jan. 28, 2020 - Feb. 3, 2020 |
| Forward Dividend & Yield | 2.04 (1.35%) |
| Ex-Dividend Date | 2019-11-20 |
| 1y Target Est | 160.38 |
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Target unleashed major sales gains by revamping staff
Target is Yahoo Finance's 2019 Company of the Year. Target COO John Mulligan explains some of the big changes he has made to Target's business this year.
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CyberArk (CYBR) Facilitates AWS Customers' Cloud Tansition
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Intel's Horse Ridge Chip Takes Quantum Computing to New High
Intel (INTC) unveils new "Horse Ridge" quantum control chip with an aim to realize quantum practicality.
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The Zacks Analyst Blog Highlights: Target, Copart, Applied Materials, Microsoft and QUALCOMM
The Zacks Analyst Blog Highlights: Target, Copart, Applied Materials, Microsoft and QUALCOMM
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IDC Data Shows Apple Dominates Wearables Market, Xiaomi Trails
Apple (AAPL) is dominating the wearables market, courtesy of Apple Watch, AirPods and Beats headphones, per latest data from IDC.
- Business Wire
NTT and Microsoft Form a Strategic Alliance to Enable New Digital Solutions
NTT and Microsoft today announced a multi-year strategic alliance to help enterprise customers accelerate their digital transformations.
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Buy Adobe Ahead of Q4 2019 Earnings with ADBE Stock Near Highs?
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- Investing.com
Asian Markets Fall; Chinese Inflation Falls in November
Investing.com - Asian markets traded lower on Tuesday morning. Chinese stocks slipped after data showed the country’s inflation fell for the fifth month in a row.
- Bloomberg
Amazon Cites Trump Bias at ‘Enemy’ Bezos in Cloud Deal Loss
(Bloomberg) -- Amazon.com Inc. claims the Pentagon failed to fairly judge its bid for a cloud contract worth up to $10 billion because President Donald Trump viewed company founder Jeffrey Bezos as his “political enemy.”Amazon Web Services, Amazon’s cloud unit, claimed in a lawsuit that was made public on Monday that the Defense Department ignored Amazon’s superior technology and awarded the contract to Microsoft Corp. despite its “key failures” to comply with requirements for the so-called Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure, or JEDI, contract.The Pentagon made those errors because of improper interference by Trump, who Amazon said “launched repeated public and behind-the-scenes attacks to steer the JEDI Contract away from AWS to harm his perceived political enemy -- Jeffrey P. Bezos,” according to the lawsuit. The president has long criticized Bezos, especially for his ownership of The Washington Post.Defense Department spokeswoman Elissa Smith denied any external factors influenced the bidding process. Microsoft spokeswoman Janelle Poole said in a statement that the Pentagon “ran a detailed, thorough and fair process in determining the needs of the warfighter were best met by Microsoft.”Amazon, which filed its lawsuit under seal last month in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims, is seeking to prohibit the Defense Department from proceeding without a new evaluation or award decision. The department won’t start work on the contract beyond certain “preparatory activities” until February 11, according to the lawsuit.“Basic justice requires reevaluation of proposals and a new award decision,” the company said in its lawsuit. “The stakes are high. The question is whether the President of the United States should be allowed to use the budget of DoD to pursue his own personal and political ends.”The Pentagon’s JEDI project is designed to consolidate the department’s cloud computing infrastructure and modernize its technology systems. Amazon was widely seen as the front-runner for the contract because it previously won a lucrative cloud deal from the Central Intelligence Agency and had earned the highest levels of federal security authorizations.Amazon said in its lawsuit that the Pentagon’s “pervasive errors are hard to understand and impossible to assess separate and apart from the President’s repeatedly expressed determination to, in the words of the President himself, ‘screw Amazon.’”Amazon was citing a new book by Guy Snodgrass, a speechwriter to former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, that alleges that Trump, in the summer of 2018, told Mattis to “screw Amazon” and lock it out of the bid. Mattis didn’t do what Trump asked, Snodgrass wrote. Mattis has criticized the book, but hasn’t commented on the allegation concerning Amazon.Amazon’s lawsuit also lists other comments and actions by Trump and the Defense Department to make its case that the Pentagon bowed to political pressure when making the award to Microsoft. In 2016, Trump said that when that he would become president, Amazon would “have problems” and that the company was “getting away with murder,” according to the lawsuit.The company also cited the president’s comments during a press conference in July, when he openly questioned whether the JEDI contract was being competitively bid, citing complaints from Microsoft, Oracle Corp. and International Business Machines Corp. Later that month, Trump “doubled down” on that rhetoric when he tweeted television coverage that characterized the JEDI contract as a “Bezos bailout,” the lawsuit says.As Trump’s criticisms persisted, Amazon alleges, the Pentagon took numerous actions to “artificially level the playing field” between the company and its competitors during the bidding process, including a decision in mid-2018 to refuse to evaluate past contract performance. For example, the lawsuit alleges that months after the Pentagon initially reviewed Amazon’s proposal, the Defense Department changed one of its requirements for hosting sensitive data, which prevented Amazon from leveraging its existing data centers and increased its total proposed price.The Seattle-based company also contends the Pentagon ignored critical aspects of its proposal while overlooking Microsoft’s deficiencies on concerns regarding security, price and its ability to offer a marketplace of third-party technology products.While no law prohibits a president from weighing in on a contract, federal agencies must follow strict rules about what they can and can’t consider when making an award decision. Agencies must choose vendors based on the criteria outlined in their requests for proposals to avoid inviting a successful legal challenge, according to procurement experts.Still, the experts have said loosing bidders such as Amazon face steep odds to successfully overturn a contracting decision on the legal basis of political or vendor bias.A study conducted by Rand Corp. found that the U.S Court of Federal claims sustained just 9% of contract protests against the Defense Department from 2008 through 2016. The Government Accountability Office sustained 2.6% of contract protests during the same time period, though a much larger percentage of challenges led the agency to make changes to the procurement decision or terms, according to the study.(Updates with comment from Microsoft starting in fourth paragraph)To contact the reporter on this story: Naomi Nix in Washington at nnix1@bloomberg.netTo contact the editors responsible for this story: Sara Forden at sforden@bloomberg.net, Larry LiebertFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com©2019 Bloomberg L.P.
- Bloomberg
How Much Would You Pay to Work Less?
(Bloomberg Opinion) -- Companies from Goldman Sachs Group Inc. to Monsanto Co. have gotten serious about making work more flexible. Thanks to apps and gadgets, you can easily tap away from a living-room couch, the bleachers at your son’s soccer game or huddled over a coconut on your Christmas vacation. There’s a hidden cost to all this for women, though – and it isn’t just the prospect of being available around the clock.A recent working paper from the International Monetary Fund measured how much salary Japanese employees would be willing to forgo to enjoy a healthier work-life balance. It found that earners making 3 million yen ($27,600) a year would give up nearly half of their income to avoid putting in 45 hours or more of overtime per month. That outcome was roughly consistent with higher-wage workers, too.The most obvious takeaway would be that companies should do everything they can to keep hours reasonable. It doesn’t take an MBA to see that lower salaries would improve the bottom line, with the added upside of happier and possibly more productive workers. There’s an important caveat, however: Women are much more eager than men to give up money for time. That mostly comes down to deeper feelings of guilt, according to the paper, not just for child-rearing but also general household responsibilities such as cooking and caring for aging parents.While this conclusion isn’t revolutionary, the policy implications are stark. For every woman who is willing to accept less money for more flexibility, there’s someone out there inclined to put in that 14-hour day at a desk. This suggests that companies eager to give women more choice by offering a four-day week or shorter hours, may wind up inadvertently deepening gender pay gaps. The better way to protect work-life balance, then, is to make sure all employees – male, female, young, old, parents and the childless – are spending fewer, more productive hours on the clock. There’s ample research to show that working more doesn’t necessarily produce better results. In fact, productivity drops off when employees work more than 50 hours a week, according to a Stanford University study. Whether you work 70 hours or 56 hours, output is roughly the same.Despite Japan’s reputation for burning the midnight oil, Americans work even more: 1,786 hours per year compared with 1,680, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Germany works the fewest at 1,363. Yet Germany is the most productive of the three, as measured by gross domestic product per hour, followed by Japan, then the U.S.The good news is that employers are starting to respond. In August, Microsoft Corp. tested out a four-day work week in its Japan locations. Productivity rose 40% from a year earlier. One local-government office in downtown Tokyo resorted to shutting off the lights at 7 p.m. to force people to go home. And in Europe, financial industry groups are pressing the London Stock Exchange to cut its trading day by 90 minutes.All this awareness is a good thing; employers and policymakers just need to recognize the pitfalls. The most troubling element of the IMF paper may have been women’s willingness to make less in a country where the pay gap is already so wide. The median income for Japanese men is 24.5% higher than for men and women. That compares with an average of 13.5% in the OECD and 18.2% in the U.S. Flexible working can mean a lot of things: telecommuting, shorter work weeks, or even the ability to set a fluid schedule, so long as you hit a certain number of hours. These options benefit men and women alike. I can’t think of a single parent who doesn’t appreciate the ability to stay on top of emails while sitting in the waiting room at the pediatrician.But what if all that multitasking only adds hours and stress? At a previous job, when my son was a baby, I was able to leave the office early to put him to bed. Yet I recall many nights spent staring into the white halo of my iPhone, crafting emails with one finger, and nursing him in the crook of my spare arm. I probably would have been willing to give up a fair chunk of salary to guiltlessly complete that work in the morning – and could have finished it quicker, to boot. Many women are wary of flexible schedules for this precise reason: They know they’ll end up working for free. Even companies with the best intentions will have difficulty accounting for an evolving definition of what constitutes time spent on the job.That’s why flexible HR policies are meaningless if culture doesn’t evolve more quickly. Japanese employees get some of the most generous family-leave packages in the world, yet few fathers take advantage of them, as my colleague Anjani Trivedi has noted. People there are literally working themselves to death with 100-hour weeks.Konosuke Matsushita, the founder of Panasonic Corp. and business-management guru, said you should think of your career as a “three-day chore” — that is, approach simple tasks with the sincerity of a lifelong occupation. It’s about time we bring as much commitment to protecting our well-being. To contact the author of this story: Rachel Rosenthal at rrosenthal21@bloomberg.netTo contact the editor responsible for this story: Patrick McDowell at pmcdowell10@bloomberg.netThis column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.Rachel Rosenthal is an editor with Bloomberg Opinion. Previously, she was a markets reporter and editor at the Wall Street Journal in Hong Kong. For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com/opinion©2019 Bloomberg L.P.
- Bloomberg
Apple to Speak at CES Conference for First Time in Decades
(Bloomberg) -- Apple Inc. is officially returning to the Las Vegas CES technology conference for the first time in decades to discuss its stance on consumer privacy -- rather than pitch a new hardware product.The company’s senior director of privacy Jane Horvath will be speaking on a “Chief Privacy Officer Roundtable” on Jan. 7, according to the CES agenda.Horvath, along with executives from Facebook Inc., Procter & Gamble Co., and a commissioner from the Federal Trade Commission, will discuss how companies build privacy at scale, regulation and consumer demands.Apple’s last major official appearance at CES was in 1992 when then Chief Executive Officer John Sculley gave a presentation at a Chicago version of the summit to introduce the failed Newton device.More recently, Apple’s technology has influenced CES despite the company not officially presenting. It made news last year for a privacy billboard during the Vegas event that exclaimed, “What happens on your iPhone, stays on your iPhone.” Samsung Electronics Co. and LG Electronics Inc. also touted Apple launching video streaming directly on third-party TVs.Each year, accessory makers fill the CES exhibit halls with cases and other peripherals for Apple devices. Behind the scenes, Apple managers roam the halls to identify future technology and scan the competitive landscape, while members of Apple’s supply chain team meet with component makers to potentially source parts for future devices.While Apple has taken a backstage approach to the conference, rivals including Google, Microsoft Corp. and Amazon.com Inc. have used the event to promote their latest voice-based products, spur interest from potential partners and try to beat Apple to the punch ahead of major product announcements.To contact the reporters on this story: Mark Gurman in Los Angeles at mgurman1@bloomberg.net;Ed Ludlow in San Francisco at eludlow2@bloomberg.netTo contact the editors responsible for this story: Tom Giles at tgiles5@bloomberg.net, Alistair Barr, Andrew PollackFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com©2019 Bloomberg L.P.
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Factors Setting the Tone for Oracle's (ORCL) Q2 Earnings
Oracle's (ORCL) fiscal second-quarter results are expected to reflect solid adoption of cloud-based services and latest Autonomous Database.
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Guardant Health, Gap, GameStop, Microsoft and Sony highlighted as Zacks Bull and Bear of the Day
Guardant Health, Gap, GameStop, Microsoft and Sony highlighted as Zacks Bull and Bear of the Day
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The Zacks Analyst Blog Highlights: Microsoft, United Technologies, Procter & Gamble, Walmart and Intel
The Zacks Analyst Blog Highlights: Microsoft, United Technologies, Procter & Gamble, Walmart and Intel
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The Zacks Analyst Blog Highlights: Alibaba, Microsoft, Apple, ExxonMobil and Royal Dutch Shell
The Zacks Analyst Blog Highlights: Alibaba, Microsoft, Apple, ExxonMobil and Royal Dutch Shell
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Zacks.com featured highlights include: ResMed, Microsoft, Zoetis and Ruth???s Hospitality
Zacks.com featured highlights include: ResMed, Microsoft, Zoetis and Ruth???s Hospitality
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Computer Software Stock Outlook: Growth Prospects Bullish
Computer Software Stock Outlook: Growth Prospects Bullish
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Stocks - Canopy Growth, ArQule Rise in Premarket; Microsoft Edges Lower
Investing.com -- Stocks in focus in premarket trade on Monday, 9th December.
- Zacks
U.S. Shale Producers to Gain as OPEC+ Deepens Output Cuts
The recent production cut of 500,000 BPD from the OPEC+ group is set to result in total output cut of 1.7 million BPD, which represents 1.7% of global demand.
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Major Indexes Set to Surpass 2013 Returns This Year: 5 Picks
The three major indexes are currently at a striking distance from their yearly gains in 2013, which was the best year for Wall Street after the great recession.
