With great honor and joy I can announce that I have been awarded the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional award for the seventh consecutive year, again in the category Office Apps & Services. Congratulations to other new and re-awarded MVPs as well, and kudos to the MVP program in undertaking the monstrous task of reviewing and evaluating thousands of contributions every award cycle.

With another award cycle also comes the time to have a look at the MVP statistics. Below numbers are taken from the public MVP site. July 3rd is chosen as the first days the site gets updated and new awardees need to turn in their NDA before they show up on the site.

Because people can get awarded each month, the comparison to July 3rd of every year indicates only yearly trend. Therefor we’ll also compare the numbers to those of June to see the impact on long-term MVP population, as awardees from January are only up for consideration in July 2021 for example.

From the numbers, it is clear that this cycle the number of MVPs went a bit down from 2.998 in June 2020 to 2.850 now (-5%), but it is higher than the 2.634 (+8%) of July 2019.

The following table contains the changes per award category from July 2019 and June 2020 to July 2020. I will leave the interpretation up to you.

Expertise	July 2019	June 2020	Change	July 2020	Change
Cloud and Datacenter Management	232	242	4%	209	-10%
Microsoft Azure	409	455	11%	463	13%
Office Apps & Services	491	530	8%	512	4%
Business Applications	166	234	41%	240	45%
Data Platform	332	375	13%	358	8%
Developer Technologies	644	742	15%	697	8%
Enterprise Mobility	106	119	12%	113	7%
AI	84	109	30%	122	45%
Office Development	47	60	28%	64	36%
Windows Development	119	123	3%	110	-8%
Windows and Devices for IT	57	55	-4%	43	-25%
Total Awards	2687	3044	13%	2931	9%
Total MVPs	2634	2998	14%	2849	8%

Note: The total number of MVPs doesn’t equal the total number of awardees, as MVPs can be awarded in more than one category; there are now 82 people awarded in multiple categories’; an increase of 57% compared to June 2019.

When zooming in on the Office Apps & Services category, the awards per country are shown below, including change compared to last year. Be advised that 26 OAS MVPs are anonymous or have profiles without information on residency.

Country	Number	Country	Number	Country	Number
Australia	24 (20%)	India	13 (0%)	Saudi Arabia	1 (0%)
Austria	3 (0%)	Ireland	1 (0%)	Serbia	1 (0%)
Belgium	5 (-38%)	Israel	1 (0%)	Singapore	3 (0%)
Bosnia and Herzegovina	1 (0%)	Italy	5 (-17%)	Slovakia	1 (0%)
Brazil	8 (-20%)	Japan	20 (-10%)	Slovenia	2 (0%)
Bulgaria	2 (0%)	Korea	12 (0%)	South Africa	4 (-20%)
Cambodia	1 (100%)	Luxembourg	1 (100%)	Spain	12 (50%)
Canada	33 (6%)	Macedonia, FYRO	2 (0%)	Sri Lanka	1 (0%)
China	17 (6%)	Malaysia	1 (0%)	Sweden	9 (80%)
Colombia	5 (25%)	Mexico	5 (0%)	Switzerland	3 (50%)
Croatia	5 (25%)	Myanmar	1 (100%)	Taiwan	4 (0%)
Czech Republic	2 (0%)	Nepal	1 (0%)	Thailand	2 (-34%)
Denmark	6 (0%)	New Zealand	6 (0%)	The Netherlands	22 (4%)
Egypt	1 (0%)	Nigeria	2 (100%)	Turkey	2 (0%)
El Salvador	1 (0%)	Norway	6 (0%)	Ukraine	2 (0%)
Finland	4 (33%)	Pakistan	1 (-50%)	United Arab Emirates	1 (-50%)
France	18 (-10%)	Poland	6 (50%)	United Kingdom	33 (17%)
Germany	24 (-4%)	Portugal	3 (50%)	United States	123 (2%)
Hungary	2 (0%)	Russia	9 (12%)	Uruguay	1 (0%)

And last, the number of Office Apps & Services and total number of MVP’s over the last years, before and after the award cycle.

	June 2017	July 2017	June 2018	July 2018	March 2019	July 2019	June 2020	July 2020
OSS	532	449	490	383	622	491	530	512
	-16%	9%	-22%	62%	-21%	8%	-3%
Total	4134	3490	3815	3030	3205	2634	2998	2849
	-16%	9%	-21%	6%	-18%	14%	-5%

On a final note, the above data is static; some MVPs have build great dashboards which allow you to work with the data more interactively (if they have updated their data set, that is). Some noteworthy mentions:

• MVP Monitor, by Andrew Koltyakov
• Microsoft MVP Power BI Report, by Reza Rad

If you have questions or comments, please leave them in the comments below.