Microsoft’s profit and revenue plummet in 2015, cloud computing grows

As for the company’s much-talked-about hardware, the Surface tablet was back on the rise after dipping in the last quarter, with revenue up 29% this time around. Office 365 is also doing well, with subscribers now topping 20.6 million with revenue growth of 70 percent in constant currency. Microsoft stressed that the performance of this business unit was one of the integral factors in the company’s strong performance for the last quarter, as revenue from server products grew 10 percent while revenue from Azure grew a whopping 140 percent.

Intelligent Cloud (IC), which includes service revenue and Enterprise Services: $6.4 billion compared to $5.9 billion in the last quarter.

Nadella also shared that Windows 10 was now powering more than 200 million devices, a number that Microsoft hopes will hit $1 billion in the next few years. Including revenue deferred to future quarters, however, the company’s earnings would have been 78 cents a share.

Revenue for Microsoft’s cloud division rose 5 percent, to $6.3 billion, for the December quarter.

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

Total revenue, however, fell 10.1% to US$23.80bil (RM98.66bil), squeezed by a strong dollar as well as a weak personal computer market that has reduced demand for Microsoft’s Windows operating system. It sub-headlines the results with a line commenting upon “cloud strength”, and the Microsoft Cloud was indeed a top performer for the company, actually it was the only one of Microsoft’s three business segments to enjoy overall growth (ignoring non GAAP constant currency figures).

And search revenue, excluding traffic acquisition costs, grew 21%, which was driven by higher revenue per search and search volume, the company said Thursday.

On the Windows side, revenue for the More Personal Computing division was down five percent, or two percent in constant currency, according to Microsoft.

Since assuming the CEO role in February 2014, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has been pushing the company to adapt to a world where people are increasingly using mobile gadgets in addition to PCs, and where businesses are moving more of their operations online.

The star of the show for Microsoft was its cloud business.

Microsoft’s gaming and digital content business reported similar growth, with Xbox Live monthly active users growing 30% year-on-year in the quarter to a record 48 million.