Microsoft posted fiscal fourth quarter earnings on Wednesday, beating Wall Street expectations on both sales and profit for the past three months amid the economic downturn caused by COVID-19. Microsoft’s Q4 earnings report reveal that its Xbox content and services business has increased by 65 percent from a year ago. Surface sales, meanwhile, jumped up by 28 percent, reaching $1.7 billion. Those figures aren’t too surprising, given the increasing demand for PCs to manage work and school at home, as well as games to keep us all sane as we’re trapped inside.
And of course, Microsoft’s cloud business is doing better than ever, with revenues of $13.4 billion. That’s a 17 percent increase from last year, which also includes a 47 percent revenue jump for its Azure cloud.
Microsoft says it earned $38.0 billion in revenue this past quarter, up 13 percent from a year ago. Of that amount, $11.2 billion was profit, a 5 percent jump from this time a year ago. The main takeaway: Microsoft’s business is booming, thanks largely to its continued gains in the cloud computing sector and big jumps in Surface and Xbox revenues.
“The last five months have made it clear that tech intensity is the key to business resilience. Organizations that build their own digital capability will recover faster and emerge from this crisis stronger,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said in a statement. He goes on to say Microsoft is in the unique position of being able to “help every organization transform and reimagine how they meet customer needs,” in other words support remote work in the new reality.
“The company is still benefiting from businesses, governments and schools reacting to the crisis and I think that was reflected in the numbers,” analyst Patrick Moorehead said in a statement. He added, “While I am not yet concerned with the declining Azure numbers as the revenue base is growing, it’s something to keep our eyes on. I can imagine, given the pandemic, how difficult full digital transformations would be without having employees at work.”
