1. Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT)
Number of Hedge Fund Holders: 259
Dividend Yield as of March 14: 1.07%
Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) is an American tech giant, currently paying a quarterly dividend of $0.68 per share. The company has been rewarding shareholders with regular increased dividends for the past 16 years, which makes it one of the best dividend-paying stocks on our list. The stock’s dividend yield on March 14 came in at 1.07%.
At the end of Q4 2022, 259 hedge funds in Insider Monkey’s database owned stakes in Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT), down from 269 in the previous quarter. These stakes have a total value of over $58.6 billion. Ken Griffin and Terry Smith were some of the company’s leading stakeholders in Q4.
Baron Funds mentioned Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) in its Q4 2022 investor letter. Here is what the firm has to say:
“Shares of mega-cap software company Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) outperformed despite a mixed fiscal first quarter due to macro challenges that negatively impacted results and guidance, including foreign exchange headwinds, weakening PC demand, and a cyclical slowdown in advertising spending. Total revenue beat Street expectations at 16% constant-currency growth (vs. estimates of 14%), but its Azure cloud computing business missed analyst projections by 1% for the second straight quarter, though it still grew a robust 42% year-over-year, as Microsoft helped its customers optimize existing workloads due to the macro backdrop. While the optimization of workloads is a short-term headwind, we believe it is the right thing to do and should help drive more consumption with customers over time. Our research continues to indicate that the longer-term secular trend of cloud computing remains healthy and intact. For example, in its fourth quarter CIO survey report, Morgan Stanley showed, among other things, that cloud computing was the second highest CIO spending priority (behind only security software), that cloud application workloads were expected to increase from 27% of total workloads today to 46% by the end of 2025, and that Azure was listed as the preferred cloud vendor and likely to take share over the short and long term.9 Additionally, Microsoft is positioned to be a prime beneficiary of ChatGPT. Microsoft invested $1 billion in OpenAI in 2020 and is rumored to be considering investing an additional $10 billion for a 49% stake in the company. Moreover, ChatGPT runs on Microsoft’s Azure platform, and Microsoft recently announced the general availability of its Azure OpenAI Service enabling Azure customers to access advanced AI models, including ChatGPT itself soon. We remain bullish on Microsoft’s long-term opportunity in the cloud, and believe AI has the potential to be additive to growth for years to come.”
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