Intelligent cloud revenue rose 5% (up 11% in constant currency) and Windows OEM revenue declined 5% in constant currency.
Advertisement
“Businesses are also piloting Windows 10, which will drive deployments beyond 200 million active devices”, the Indian-born top executive added.
This division covers Microsoft’s Office productivity tools, including Office 365 and the Dynamics business software lines, where Office consumer revenue declined by 14 percent, or eight percent in constant currency.
On Thursday, the company said its revenue and profit fell in the last quarter, however, this doesn’t make much of a difference as it made more from cloud computing with the stocks increasing by more than five percent after the release of the numbers. Windows revenue normally is tied to the success of PCs which fell 10.6 percent globally in the December quarter from a year earlier, according to research firm IDC.
Like everyone, Microsoft was keen to highlight fast-growing “commercial cloud” computing sales, which it claims are now running at an annualised rate of $9.4bn.
In addition, Microsoft’s financial results for the reporting quarter have further revealed that the company’s revenue from smartphone sales plunged 53 percent, or $1.2 billion, during the quarter. The company has set a goal of having a billion devices running the software in a couple years’ time.
Cloud services are going so well for Microsoft that Business Insider suggests it is growing faster than Amazon’s reported 127% in revenue gain. Mobile phone revenues were down 49 percent. Office 365 now has 20.6 million subscribers. While revenue from server based products rose by 10%, Azure revenue grew 140%.
Revenue in the business that includes Windows fell 5% to US$12.66bil (RM52.52bil).
Microsoft’s hybrid tablet Surface devices drove $1.35 billion in sales in the quarter, up 29% thanks to the launch of the Surface Book laptop and Pro 4 touch-screen.
Advertisement
In a January 28 earnings conference call, he claimed that “70 percent of the Fortune 500 [are using] at least two different Microsoft cloud offerings”. Microsoft and Nokia have sold a total of 110 million Windows Phones compared to 4.5 billion iOS and Android phones in the same period.
