This Company was the Top Public Company of 2018

2018 was an interesting year for the market as the trade war and other factors created a volatile trading arena. While many stocks saw big gains, many also saw big losses. The company that closed out the year as the top public company was tech giant Microsoft.

Microsoft was one of the top gainers trading on the Dow Jones Industrial Average in 2018 and even surpassed iPhone maker Apple as the world’s most valuable company by market cap this past November.

At the end of the year, Microsoft’s market cap stood at $779.7 billion as the stock closed at $101.57 per share. The stock saw a gain of nearly 19% in 2018.

This is the first time Microsoft has ended a year as the world’s highest valued public company since 2002, despite reporting a dismal fourth quarter. The quarter went down as one of Microsoft’s worst in its history. Gaming however became a $10 billion business for the first time ever for the company.

While shares declined 11% during the quarter, it was still better than the 25% loss thart Amazon saw and the 30% loss that Apple experienced.

“The rationale for acquiring the asset is appealing, in our opinion,” Piper Jaffray analysts led by Alex Zukin noted this past September.

“For Microsoft, developer mind share and wallet share is paramount. Microsoft believes that developers will have an outsized voice at the table in the age of digital transformation and that this was the most important reason for the acquisition. Secondarily, the company also believes that they can drive increased GitHub monetization.”

“After another year of strong relative performance …, we believe Microsoft remains well positioned to continue to deliver steady top line and bottom line growth over the next 3-5 years given the breadth of its cloud portfolio, its growing annuity revenue base, and its strong balance sheet,” Evercore ISI analysts led by Kirk Materne wrote in December.

Disclaimer: We have no position in Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ: MSFT) and have not been compensated for this article.