(News Bulletin 247) – According to the Financial Times and Reuters, the Redmond group overtook that of Cupertino at the start of the session on Wall Street. Around 4:30 p.m., Apple was still behind by a handful of dollars.

It is not only in the French government that a transfer of power is taking place. This was also the case on Wall Street where Apple, at the start of the session, abandoned its title of largest market capitalization in the world, reported the Financial Times and Reuters.

Around 4:30 p.m., Apple was very slightly behind, losing 1.1%, for a market capitalization of $2.865 billion, while Microsoft gained 0.76% to $2.866 billion, according to data from Yahoo Finance.

Microsoft’s takeover was expected in view of the recent weakness of Apple shares, which have dropped 4% since the start of the year, while the company led by Satya Nadella has progressed by 2.4%, a significant difference in only eight sessions.

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iPhone sales at half mast in China

Apple recently suffered from the poor start of the year for iPhone sales in China, a country which represents around 20% of its revenues. According to a note from Jefferies, cited by CNBC, Apple sold 30% fewer copies of its famous smartphone in the country in the first week of January.

Last week, Barclays downgraded its advice on the Cupertino group to “underweight”, the equivalent of selling at other banks. The British establishment, cited by Reuters, judges that demand for Macs and iPhones is likely to be weak this year.

“The iPhone 15 was very lackluster and we expect the same thing for the iPhone 16,” explained the establishment. Barclays also points to China where Apple faces vigorous competition from Huawei in particular. The group also has to deal with pressure from the Chinese government on civil servants not to use foreign brand smartphones at work.

In addition, the group is also threatened in the United States where, according to the New York Times, the American Department of Justice is preparing to launch an antitrust investigation into the group regarding practices that make it difficult for its users to leave the group devices to purchase competing products.

AI, Microsoft’s great fuel

In the longer term, Apple is much less exposed than Microsoft to last year’s big stock market trend, namely generative artificial intelligence (AI). This form of AI, which constitutes the fuel for the ChatGPT and Bard conversational robots, has propelled, for example, Nvidia shares, which gained more than 240% last year and are still up 9.5% since the start. of the year.

Microsoft has invested billions of dollars in OpenAI, the company that created ChatGPT, and holds approximately 49% of the capital, according to American media. This has allowed it to integrate ChatGPT technologies into several of its flagship products and divisions, such as the Bing search engine and its Azure cloud computing unit.

And to give a boost to its growth. In the last published quarter, Azure recorded a nice increase in revenue of 29%, an increase which included a contribution of three percentage points from artificial intelligence. In comparison, Google Cloud’s growth only reached 22% over the same period.

“Microsoft has a head start in AI. We believe there is potential to accelerate revenue growth (towards close to 20% compared to around 15% currently) through the contribution growth of AI in the two main growth sectors”, judges Bank of America. These “engines” are therefore Azure, but also office applications with Copilot, a personal assistant launched in March on its Microsoft 365 applications (Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Teams, etc.) and which also runs on AI.