The company’s strengths can be seen in multiple areas, such as its solid stock price performance, increase in net income, reasonable valuation levels, expanding profit margins and good cash flow from operations. According to Microsoft, “Office commercial products and cloud services” revenue grew five per cent in constant currency, “driven by Office 365 revenue growth of almost 70 per cent”.
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Tencent develops apps for all other major platforms, including Windows (on desktop), OS X, iOS, and Android, but will not make a Windows 10 Mobile app. Phone revenues declined almost 50% from the same quarter a year ago.
Overall, Microsoft saw a boost in its Surface tablet sales, helped along by the release of the company’s Surface Pro 4 and Surface Book.
Revenue from the “intelligent cloud” business, which includes products such as its Azure cloud infrastructure and services business along with other non-cloud products such as traditional servers, rose 5 per cent to $6.3 billion. The Redmond, Wash., software giant, meanwhile, is inching closer to its goal of attaining a $20 billion annual run rate for its commercial cloud business in the company’s 2018 fiscal year.
Microsoft Corp. continued an era of renewed vitality in the latest quarter, showing progress in newer cloud-computing services as well as in such established business lines as Windows.
Shares rose 5.5 per cent to $US54.91 a share in after-hours trading. The numbers beat analysts’ estimates.
The revenue Microsoft generated from their cloud business, including the Azure platform used by many businesses for storage and collaboration, was up by 5% to 6.3 billion dollars (£4.3bn), while Azure revenue alone was up by 140%.
Microsoft also did not reveal how many Xbox One consoles it sold this quarter.
Revenue was $23.8 billion, down 10 percent from $26.5 billion a year earlier. Windows 10 adoption continues to outstrip expectations, with roughly 200 million devices running the operating system.
The number of people using the Xbox Live service for digital content and video games climbed 30% to a record 48 million.
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The company said it will provide financial outlook when it holds a conference call with analysts later on Thursday.
