Microsoft Corp came on reporting beating quarterly results on Wednesday as its quarterly revenue and profit surpassed the Wall Street estimates, largely because of tens of billions of dollars in sales made by company’s rapidly growing cloud business and a surprising boost up in revenue from Windows.
The surpassing results and prediction of cloud business continue to be growing led the company’s value briefly crossing $1 trillion mark for the first time on Wednesday.
The Redmond, Washington-based company, led by Satya Nadella as its Chief Executive, for past five years remained under strategic transformation as the company continues reducing its reliance on Windows operating system, which was once a dominant operating system in the world, and shifted its focus on business of selling cloud-based services.
Azure is Microsoft’s flagship cloud product, which provides computing power to businesses and competes with Amazon Web Service (AWS) in cloud computing market as its main rival.
For the third quarter ended March 31, Microsoft posted earnings per share of $1.14 that remained above from analysts’ expectations of $1 per share, according to IBES data from Refinitiv.
Windows licensing revenue from computer makers, which dropped by 5 percent in previous quarter, beat the expectation by growing at a pace of 9 percent year over year. Mike Spencer, Microsoft’s head of investor relations, said a shortage of Intel Corp PC-processor chips, which was likely to be continued into this summer, had stand resolved which made the PC makers able to ship more than expected machines in the quarter.
Microsoft’s “commercial cloud” unit, which includes commercial use of Azure, LinkedIn and Office 365, posted revenue of $9.6 billion in the reported quarter, slightly down from previous quarter growth rate of 48 percent but above 41 percent from that of the previous year.
Microsoft’s “intelligent cloud” revenue was $9.65 billion this quarter, up from analysts’ estimates of $9.28 billion, according to IBES data from Refinitiv.
Analysts were estimating Microsoft generating total revenue of $29.84 billion, but that rose to $30.57 increasing at the rate of 14 percent.
Microsoft’s net income remained $8.81 billion, or $1.15 per share which was $7.42 billion, or 96 cents per share in year ago quarter.
