A woman walks by a sign at Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, Washington. Image credit: Microsoft.
Microsoft's (MSFT 0.59%) fortunes may be ebbing, but it still generates a ridiculous amount of money. Over the last 12 months, it earned $91 billion in revenue, ranking 26th among S&P 500 companies. What does the 40-year-old company do with all this money? The slideshow below provides an answer.
Viewers of the slideshow will learn three interesting points, among other things, from scrolling through it:
- First, Microsoft has paid more in taxes over the last four quarters than all but four publicly traded companies: Apple, General Electric, ExxonMobil, and Wal-Mart.
- Second, Microsoft enjoys wide profit margins. Its pre-tax operating margin over the past 12 months was 20% compared to a 17% median among the S&P 500's 100 biggest companies.
- Which, third, goes a long way toward explaining why shares of the software company have outperformed the S&P 500 by approximately 11,000 percentage points since 1990.
What else can investors learn about Microsoft from an analysis of its revenue flows? Scroll through the brief slideshow below to find out.
All slideshow data sourced from YCharts.com on Nov. 24, 2015. Slideshow image credits: Microsoft, istock/Thinkstock.
