Microsoft Stocks Jump As Cloud Computing, Surface Divisions Continue To Grow

Microsoft said this reflected the company’s strategy change, announced in July 2015. Analysts were expecting per-share earnings of 71 cents on revenue of $25.2 billion.

Wall Street was looking for second quarter non-GAAP earnings of 71 cents a share on revenue of $25.26 billion.

Shares of Microsoft climbed by as much as 7.89% to $56.16 per share in after-hours trades. Sales for server products and cloud services revenue grew 10% in constant currency, while Azure revenue grew 140% in constant currency with revenue from Azure premium services growing almost 3x year-over-year.

“Businesses are also piloting Windows 10, which will drive deployments beyond 200m active devices”.

More Personal Computing (MPC), which contains Windows, Devices, Gaming and Search: $12.7 billion. Within that division, Microsoft said revenue from licensing Windows to PC makers was also down 5 per cent, although the company pointed out that was better than the 8.3 per cent decline in overall PC sales that market researchers have estimated for the October-December quarter.

The company said its sales of “Intelligent cloud” computing rose 5% to $6.3 billion, and would have been up 11% if not for the effect of the rising USA dollar. “The rise of HoloLens and Xbox as Windows platforms with Universal Windows Apps will continue this as the year unfolds, and absent any stumbles, seeding the cloud will make rain there as well”.

The company saw Office 365 revenue increase 70pc with Office 365 consumer subscribers increasing to 20.6m users.

“The enterprise cloud opportunity is massive, larger than any market we have ever participated in”, Mr Nadella said in a conference call. Microsoft’s phone revenue fell a whopping 49% in constant currency, though.

There were a lot of good and bad sides to the results that came out from Microsoft’s practices.

All thanks to Microsoft which sold only 4.5 million Lumia mobile devices in the recent quarter, as compared to 10.5 million units sold in the same period a year ago, according to The Verge.

Microsoft said that it made a profit of $5 billion on $23.8 billion in revenue in the final three months of past year, saying strong sales of the Xbox games console and Surface tablet helped it beat expectations.