Despite PC market decline Microsoft and Apple expected to dominate the industry in 2018

Analyst company Moody’s Investor Service claim that 2018 will be a good year for Microsoft and Apple despite the continuing decline in the PC industry as people are moving forward with portable devices instead of using PCs.

Microsoft, in particular, had a decent year with Cloud business and Surface sales. This should continue in the coming year if the analysts are to be believed, with  Microsoft and Apple dominating the IT sector moving forward.

Moody’s expects aggregate revenue to grow 3.5%-4.5% in 2018, but only 2.5%-3.5% if you exclude Apple and Microsoft. Similarly, Moody’s forecasts 6%-7% growth in operating profit for the sector, but only 5.5%-6.5% when excluding the two companies.

Revenue growth will be driven by equipment and software purchases and services related to the ongoing migration to cloud-based IT systems from legacy IT architectures.

Microsoft and Apple are together expected to contribute to more than half of the total operating profit of the IT industry and will grow more in 2018. Microsoft is already dominating the IT industry with Windows Operating System and Apple is slowing catching up with new MacBooks. Interestingly, both the companies are focusing more on laptops and tablets instead of working on PCs. While Microsoft did introduce the Surface Studio, Apple hasn’t made any significant contribution to PC market space which will further contribute to the decline of desktop PCs.

Analysts at Evercore ISI has recently predicted Microsoft could “reasonably” be worth more than $1 trillion by 2020, if not sooner, based largely on their cloud business.

While we are just under two weeks from 2018, it will be interesting to see what companies like Microsoft and Apple have in store for us next year. We still have around a month till CES which should set an outline of what’s about to come in 2018.

Via: Windows Latest

Some links in the article may not be viewable as you are using an AdBlocker. Please add us to your whitelist to enable the website to function properly.