The shares of Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) have dropped in excess of 12 percent in the last 2 days trading at $41.19 with current P/E ratio of 16.62. The tech company has announced free Office access for tablet users offering Word, PowerPoint, and Excel for free. The Windows maker is struggling against its stronger mobile rivals including both Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) and Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOGL).
Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT), is trying to win over mobile customers with new strategies including offering free mobile version of Office suite for Apple’s iPhone last year in March. At the same time, the company is offering mobile version of its email platform Outlook for iPhone and iPad devices. The Windows-maker is likely to release a touch-friendly version of Outlook for Android users later this year.
As per market experts, the tech giant is offering its Office suite free so that it can increase its customer base and then offer the full-version of Office 365 suite later for a fee. The Office apps of the company are now available for download on Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOGL)’s app store. The tech giant has received success with its Word, Excel, and PowerPoint on iOS with over 80 million downloads since last March.
Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) lags behind Google and Apple in mobile services but that is not the only reason to worry for Mr. Nadella. The mainstream PC business of the company has suffered in the past several months primarily because of a change in consumer behavior. Nadella is trying to limit Microsoft’s dependency on its PC business by putting more emphasis over its cloud services including Office 365. The company reported $1.3 billion in revenues from its cloud unit in its second quarter.
The strong dollar is another important factor that will affect the revenue streams of the company in 2015 considering its huge foreign markets.
This article has been written by Prakash Pandey.
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