As much of a blue chip now as it ever was in the past, Microsoft (MSFT 0.73%) has continued to reward its long-term shareholders. Despite some recent gloom hovering over it and other tech stocks, Microsoft's share price has generally managed to rise over the years. In fact, if we look through a nearly 20-year lens, the stock is quite the outperformer.
A 10-bagger and then some
Let's dial it back to a time when Microsoft, hounded by shareholders for never paying a dividend despite sitting on a monster pile of cash, caved in and declared its first payout in January 2003.
Buying $10,000 worth of the company's stock on the day that first dividend was paid would have nabbed you 421 shares with a bit of change left over. This position would be worth slightly over $100,940.93 today, for a more than tenfold increase.
NASDAQ: MSFT
Key Data Points
And that's not counting the dividends. Microsoft quickly shifted from an annual to a quarterly payout in late 2004 and hasn't looked back since. Also in 2004, it dispensed a special dividend of $3 per share. If we factor in these disbursements, our total return on that initial $10,000 outlay on the stock swells to just north of $110,730.
Many fingers in many pies
Dividends are sweet, but Microsoft's acceptance and adoption of them is hardly the only reason the stock has risen so dramatically. No one has ever managed to knock the company off its perch as the dominant PC operating system (OS) and productivity suite purveyor -- its Windows OS is far and away the leader in the former category, and Microsoft Office continues to outpace the competition in the latter.
From this solid foundation, Microsoft has branched out over the years into a host of other lucrative endeavors.
It wasn't always successful with such forays -- remember the Zune line of personal music devices or the Bing search engine that attempted to compete with Alphabet's mighty Google (and continues to be a distant runner-up)? It's gotten smarter about its segments in recent years, thankfully.
These days, Microsoft is extremely competitive in cloud computing, for example, with its Azure being the No. 2 operator in that segment. The company's gaming unit, anchored by the durable Xbox line of consoles and (if all goes well) soon to be well augmented by the purchase of Activision Blizzard, has been a solid performer over the years too.
Yes, Azure's once-torrid revenue growth is slowing, but the business is still bringing in the bucks for its owner, with a 35% year-over-year improvement on the top line in its most recently reported quarter. That matters because the Intelligent Cloud segment Azure is a part of contributed nearly 41% to the company's total revenue during the period.
There's still plenty of room for more double-digit growth. The cloud market overall is expected to rise at a compound annual growth rate of just under 18% between the years 2022 to 2028, according to projections by Fortune Business Insights.
A real tech sector bargain
Microsoft's sagging share price -- it's down nearly $100 per share from its peak in late 2021 -- isn't due only to the slump in tech stocks. Despite the aforementioned growth, some investors were expecting better, and they weren't cheered by the "slowdown" of Azure.
Yet this is a large, powerful, and resilient company with numerous revenue streams and costs that are modest compared to sales. Analysts are expecting continued improvement in key figures; collectively, they're estimating revenue will rise 7% and per-share earnings 4% in the current fiscal year over the previous one. Next fiscal year should be even better, with those gains coming in at a respective 13% and 17%.
That growth, combined with high profitability, will help lift free cash flow (FCF) and, by extension, the dividend.
So ultimately, what you've got with Microsoft is a somewhat out-of-favor company that still has double-digit growth in front of it and is well poised to enact continued dividend raises. To me, that's a pretty good stock to own.
