Check back later for our full analysis on Microsoft’s second quarter earnings report!
Advertisement
There’ll be cause for extra celebration, of course, if it turns out Microsoft ($MSFT) pulled off a stronger-than-expected quarter.
Microsoft today reported earnings for its second fiscal quarter of 2016, including revenue of $25.69 billion and earnings per share of $0.78. “We believe Microsoft is seeing a generally healthy demand on cloud and core enterprise build-outs and is slowly moving away from the PC environment which clearly has massive headwinds”.
Earnings per share were $0.62 with Microsoft also returning $6.5 billion to investors in the form of repurchases and dividends over this quarter.
Revenue in the More Personal Computing unit, including products like Windows, search, Xbox and devices, fell 4.7 per cent to $US12.7 billion, compared with the $US12.4 billion estimate of five analysts.
“Businesses everywhere are using the Microsoft Cloud as their digital platform to drive their ambitious transformation agendas”, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said in a statement.
Analysts polled by Thomson Reuters had expected adjusted per-share profit of 71 cents and revenue of $US25.26 billion.
Shares rose 5.5 per cent to $US54.91 a share in after-hours trading.
While the traditional Office business – the software suite that includes Word, Excel and PowerPoint – has been lackluster in recent quarters, the Office 365 cloud versions of those programs are growing in both consumer and corporate usage. The company is aiming for a commercial cloud annualized run rate of $20 billion by fiscal year 2018. Analysts had forecast for revenue of $6.29 billion, CNBC.com reports.
Office 365 has been a runaway success. That division is the home of services like Windows Azure and products for servers and cloud computing. “We have continually exceeded all growth expectations here in Australia with the Surface, so broadening our reach will enable us with more customers that want to incorporate it into their business”, she said.
Advertisement
Within that, Microsoft said its Azure cloud computing offering saw sales rise by 140% in constant-currency terms. “Businesses are also piloting Windows 10, which will drive deployments beyond 200 million active devices”. This was largely driven by increased sales of Microsoft’s surface line, though phone revenue expectedly declined by 49 percent.
