Microsoft's stock market value ended Friday's trading session higher than that of Apple for the first time since 2021, making it the world's most valuable company.

Although Apple's shares have seen a substantial decline in valuation at the start of the year, its shares crept up by 0.2% on Friday, while its market capitalization was $2.875 trillion on Thursday. However, Microsoft's shares saw a larger increase of 1% on Friday, raising the company's capitalization to $2.887 trillion, according to LSEG data.

Overall Apple's shares have seen a 3% hit in 2024, due to concerns about smartphone demand, a few months after it launched its all-new iPhone 15. On the other hand, Microsoft shares have seen a 3% overall increase, due to successful investment in the artificial intelligence sector, specifically in OpenAI, which launched ChatGPT in November 2022.

Investing heavily in AI

As the company' encroached on its third straight quarter of falling revenues, in August 2023, Apple CEO Tim Cook stated that the corporation would be investing extensively in artificial intelligence (AI). The announcement coincided with the company's worst sales numbers since 2016 and did little to push up its valuation, from a presenting downward trend.

Cook told Reuters that the increased Research and Development (R&D) investment was driven in part by work on generative artificial intelligence, the same sector that is driving spending at Alphabet and Microsoft.

According to a recent report by The Guardian, decreased demand in China for Apple's most recent product, the iPhone 15, has driven realized sales down, which comes in part due to the resurgence of Huawei in local markets. The Chinese tech company faced harsh sanctions by the United States, after acquiring a substantial 13% market share in 2018, marking unprecedented numbers in a highly-contested market. US sanctions banned the phone maker from accessing essential software and hardware, which would have kept it up-to-date with industry leaders. 

Recently, the company resurfaced after launching its flagship Mate 60 Pro smartphone, which utilizes the all-new 5G-capable Kirin 9000s chip. Powering its device with an advanced 7-nanometer processor, dubbed Kirin 9000S, highlighted the Chinese company's willpower to overcome US bans and restrictions.

Read more: Microsoft to fire 10,000 employees in 5% workforce cut: Reports