Finally, the share price of Microsoft (MSFT, Financial) increased 18.4%, boosting the Fund’s return by 0.4%. Positive sentiment around generative AI’s capacity to drive future growth continued to outweigh near-term concerns over decelerating Azure growth. Microsoft remains the dominant global enterprise software platform providing both an offensive and defensive role for the portfolio. The company’s technological leadership and breadth of its productivity suite enable it to not only win in secular growth areas like cloud, but also benefit from vendor consolidation in this environment of weaker IT spending.
From the Parnassus Value Equity Fund (Trades, Portfolio)'s second-quarter commentary.
