On Tuesday, Nvidia surpassed Microsoft to become the world's most valuable company, with a market cap of $3.34 trillion, surpassing Microsoft's $3.32 trillion. #2024 Macro Outlook#
In the first week of June, Nvidia CEO Huang Renxun led the company's market capitalization to break through $3 trillion for the first time, surpassing Apple. The chipmaker based in Santa Clara, California, dominates the market, and its popular semiconductor products provide support for AI-related computing tasks in large data centers. Over the past year, Nvidia's stock price has soared more than 200%.
"AI godfather" Huang Renxun and Nvidia are leading this AI revolution, a race to a $4 trillion market cap. Nvidia, Microsoft, and Apple are competing for the top spot." said Dan Ives, a top analyst and executive partner of Wedbush Securities.
Huang Renxun co-founded Nvidia with Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem in 1993. According to Fortune magazine, Torsten Sløk, chief economist at Apollo Global Management, said that so far this year, the S&P 500 index's market capitalization growth of about 34.5% can be attributed to Nvidia alone.
On May 22, Nvidia announced its quarterly results ending on April 28, and showed no signs of slowing down. During the earnings conference call, Nvidia's Executive Vice President and CFO Colette Kress said that revenue in this quarter was $26 billion, an increase of 18% from the previous quarter and 262% year-on-year, far exceeding the company's expected $24 billion.
"Colette Kress, as Nvidia's CFO, played a key role in the company's success on Wall Street and is a key vision of Huang Renxun," Ives said. "She is respected within Nvidia and throughout the technology industry."
Kress joined Nvidia as CFO in 2013. Prior to that, she held various financial positions in major technology companies for nearly 25 years. She previously served as CFO of Cisco's business technology and operations finance division and worked at Microsoft for 13 years, including four years as CFO of the server and tools division.
Kress revealed her career plan in an interview.
"My career background has been very beneficial to me. When I first started working at Nvidia, it was the smallest company I had ever worked for. Now it has become quite large, but the key is how you view the future and ensure that we are prepared to expand.
"As the company expands, some technologies and processes must evolve over time. How do we digitize manual processes? Our rapid growth rate has put this issue first and foremost. Especially when I lead the finance department and the sister and brother organizations around me, I hope they will say, 'Hey, we need to modify processes and how functional departments work together to create digital solutions.'"
"Looking back on my more than 30-year career, what fascinates me is that there are so many different ways to do things that never existed before-even in some of the largest companies I have worked for in the past."
She is now working at the largest company. This is clearly an important reason why she can do this.