Microsoft has doubled earnings for Azure

Microsoft finished the quarter with a 6% increase in total revenue to $ 23.6 billion, slightly higher than analysts' expectations. At the same time, Azure cloud platform revenue increased 93% to $ 15.2 billion.

Clouds in Microsoft show the highest dynamics

According to the report of Microsoft on the results of the III fiscal quarter. 2017 (started July 1, 2016), the company's total revenue (non-GAAP) increased by 6% compared to the same period last year and amounted to $ 23.6 billion. Earnings per share was $ 0.73. In general, the results coincided with forecasts of Wall Street analysts, who expected revenues of $ 23.6 billion and earnings of $ 0.70 per share. A year earlier, Microsoft's quarterly earnings per share were $ 0.62.

The most impressive results for the quarter were demonstrated by the cloud business Microsoft - "Intelligent Cloud", which brought the company in the first three months of 2017 revenue of $ 6.8 billion, which is 11% more than last year's figures for the same quarter.

Azure's cloud business platform revenue showed the highest growth, reaching $ 15.2 billion, which is 93% more than earned in the previous quarter.

According to the official data of the company, the growth drivers were the increased demand for both base and premium services Azure.

Microsoft expects its cloud business to grow to a level of $ 20 billion as early as 2018, while in earlier forecasts it was 2020.

"Our quarterly results reflect the confidence of customers residing in Microsoft Cloud," said Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella when announcing financial results. "Our customers from large multinational companies to SMBs and NGOs around the world, they all use Microsoft's cloud platform to ensure their digital transformation."

Results for other Microsoft departments

The completed quarter was the first full quarter after the closing of the deal by Microsoft for $ 26 billion for the acquisition of a professional social network LinkedIn. According to forecasts, LinkedIn expects quarterly revenues of about $ 950 million. The actual result was even better: LinkedIn brought the company $ 975 million.

  

In the productive segment, revenue from such products as Office and Dynamics is predominant. The total quarterly revenue of this division of Microsoft was $ 8 billion ($ 6.5 billion for the quarter a year earlier).

According to Zack Moxcey, Microsoft's Investor Relations Director, the commercial version of Office 365 is currently used by more than 100 million users, which demonstrates a 45% increase in product popularity compared to the same period last year.

Drawdown on profitability in the last quarter was demonstrated by the personal computing division - The More Personal Computing, which takes into account revenue from Windows, gadgets (including all Surface variations), games and search. In the first three months of 2017, this division generated revenues of $ 8.8 billion, although a year earlier the revenue was $ 9.5 billion.

The decrease in revenues for this division in Microsoft is attributed, mainly, to a drop in the profitability of Surface immediately by 26%. The rest of the revenue components of the unit - such as Windows OEM, games and search, showed an increase of between 4% and 8%.

According to the company's representatives, the decrease in revenue is due to the powerful price competition in the personal systems market and the increased life cycle of products from the current portfolio.

About Microsoft Azure Business Platform

Azure's cloud service was launched by Microsoft in 2008 under the name Windows Azure, and only in 2014 the platform was renamed Microsoft Azure. The platform offers cloud models "platform as a service" (PaaS) and "infrastructure as a service" (IaaS). The stability of Windows Azure provides a global network of Microsoft data centers.

Feature of Windows Azure is the payment only on the fact of consumed resources, multithreaded structure of calculations and abstraction from the infrastructure. Among the most popular offers Azure includes data storage and placement in the "cloud" of applications and web projects.