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Running Head: MICROSOFT CORPORATION

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1. Select a large publicly traded company (such as Microsoft, Google, IBM, Disney, etc.). Your company should have been public for at least 5 years. Prepare a paper which discusses the items below. 2. Company Overview: State what company you have chosen and provide a brief overview of the company, explaining what industry and lines of business it is in and other noteworthy information. (Good sources: The company's annual report, 10K SEC filing, Mergent database, Hoover's database.) 3. Competitive Overview: Identify the company's primary competitors. Show the size in revenues or market cap of the company along with its top competitors. Discuss anything noteworthy related to competition. (Good sources: Yahoo! Finance, Mergent, Hoover's.) 4. Financial Overview: Review the company's recent financial performance. Provide a high level summary of the income statement and balance sheet for the most recent (2 or 3) years available. Provide at least two financial ratios and explain their meaning. Provide a brief analysis of the financial information you have presented. (Good sources: Yahoo! Finance and Google Finance, 10K SEC filing.) 5. Paper Mechanicsshould be as follows: 6. The body of the paper should be 2-3 pages. 7. The paper should be in APA format (i.e. cover page, double-spaced, 12 pt font, reference section at end, etc.). 8. The paper should include at least 3 sources, such as the annual report, Yahoo! Finance or Google Finance, the company's web site, etc. 9. The paper should be divided into the sections indicated above (label each section clearly).

Microsoft Corporation



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Microsoft Corporation Professor: Date:

Company overview Microsoft is an American multinational technology Corporation which deals with manufacturing, developing, licensing, and selling computer software, various electronics and personal computers and service provision. The company is best known for the software products known as Microsoft Windows operating systems, Microsoft Office office suite, and Internet Explorer/Edge web browsers. Its current hardware products are the Microsoft Surface tablet and the Xbox game consoles. Right now, it is the world's largest software company in terms of revenue making it to the world's most valuable corporations. By 2015, Microsoft was a market leader in both the IBM PC-compatible operating system (even though it is losing its majority operating system stake to Android) and office software suite markets with Microsoft Office. The corporation also manufactures a wide range of

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Microsoft Corporation desktop software and servers, and also relevant in areas such as Internet search with Bing, making entrants into video game industry with Xbox, Xbox 360 and Xbox consoles, digital service provision by the help of MSN, and also mobile phones market through the operating systems of Nokia's former devices Windows Phone OS. In June 2012, Microsoft made entrants into the personal computer market by launching the Microsoft Surface which is a line of tablet devices[ CITATION Mic16 \l 1033 ]. Competitive overview The primary competitors for Microsoft Corporations are obviously the most powerful technology firms in the industry such as Apple, Google, SAP, IBM and Oracle, and others. Due to the fact that Microsoft is diversified as it offers different types of products and services, it faces rigid competition in this different key area of the technology industry. Microsoft is a major player in the field of hardware production. This hardware product includes tablets that have been designed to compete with other devices manufactured by firms such as Apple. The business manufacturers a variation of computer accessories which attracts direct competition from several companies that specialize in that area in the likes of Logitech[ CITATION Ent14 \l 1033 ]. In the PC operating-system software product line, Microsoft controls the market with DOS and Windows. It has established this dominance in this industry due to the superior marketing and research together with strategic partnerships with great hardware manufacturers who produce personal computers. This has made DOS and Windows OS to be the operating environment of necessity for the most personal computers in the market[ CITATION Mor151 \l 1033 ]. Financial overview

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Microsoft Corporation The company has sharpened its focus in 2015 fiscal year, by prioritizing its investments and talent in regions where differentiation and potential for growth will remain. The company executed its financial discipline by hitting a $93.6 billion revenue, $18.2 billion operating income, $60.5 billion gross margins, and $12.2 billion net income. They have significantly increased the total cash return to its shareholders by almost 50 % to $23.3 billion[ CITATION Mic16 \l 1033 ]. With a lot of new innovation surfacing the market, the company is on track to achieve two main objectives by the fiscal year 2018, that is, a $20 billion annual commercial cloud revenue run rate and getting to 1 billion Windows 10 active users every month. The following table shows Microsoft financial overview in the fiscal year 2014 and 2015 as extracted from [ CITATION Nas16 \l 1033 ];

(In millions, except per share data) Year Ended June 30, 2015 2014 (b) Revenue $93,580 $86,833 Gross margin $60,542 $59,755 Operating income $18,161 (a) $27,759 Net income $12,193 (a) $22,074 Diluted earnings per share $1.48 (a) $2.63 Cash dividends declared per share $1.24 $1.12 Cash, cash equivalents, and short-term investments $96,526 $85,709 Total assets $176,223 $172,384 Long-term obligations $46,282 $36,975 Stockholders' equity $80,083 $89,784 Microsoft has a current ratio of 2.5. The current ratio is a liquidity ratio which is used to measures the company's ability offset current and long-term liabilities by considering the current total assets and the current total liabilities. Other financial ratios include the quick ratio of 2.44 and cash ratio of 1.94.

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Microsoft Corporation

References Entrepreneur. (2014). Competitive Analysis. Retrieved from Entrepreneur Articles: https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/25756 Microsoft. (2016). Annual Report 2015. Retrieved from Microsoft: https://www.microsoft.com/investor/reports/ar15/index.html Morning-star. (2015). Microsoft Corp MSFT. Retrieved from Morning Star Finance: http://financials.morningstar.com/ratios/r.html?t=MSFT Nasdaq. (2016). Microsoft Financial analysis. Retrieved from Nasdaq Financials: http://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/msft/financials?query=ratios...