Microsoft Beats Wall Street’s Estimates in Q4 Results

Tech giant Microsoft released its quarterly earnings report this week that exceeded Wall Street’s expectations.

Despite the beat, the company’s stock fell by nearly 3% in after-hours trading on Wednesday.

For the fourth quarter, Microsoft reported revenue of $38 billion compared to $35.5 billion that was expected according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Earnings per share at $1.46 was also ahead of the $1.36 expected by analysts.

Intelligent Cloud came in at $13.4 billion, also ahead of the $13.1 billion expected. More Personal Computing was $13.4 billion, ahead of the $13.1 billion expected.

Microsoft does not reveal its Azure revenue, but did report a 47% growth for the cloud platform.
“We delivered record results this fiscal year, powered by our commercial cloud which surpassed $50 billion in revenue for the first time, up 36% year over year. 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,” said Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s CEO.

Nadella also said on the earnings call, “Organizations that build their own digital capability will recover faster and emerge from this crisis stronger. We are seeing businesses accelerate the digitization of every part of their operations from manufacturing to sales and customer service to reimagine how they meet customer needs from curbside pickup and contactless shopping in retail to telemedicine in healthcare. That’s why we are building the full modern technology stack powered by cloud and AI, and underpinned by security and compliance to help every organization digitally transform. Now, I’ll highlight our innovation and momentum starting with Azure.”

He added, “Every organization today needs a distributed computing fabric to run essential workloads. We are building Azure as the world’s computer to support them with data center regions — more data center regions than any other provider, including new regions as of this quarter in Italy, New Zealand, and Poland. We have always led in hybrid and we are accelerating our innovation to meet customers’ needs wherever they are. Azure Arc is the first control plane built for a multi-cloud, multi-edge world, and we are taking it further with Azure Arc-enabled Kubernetes.”
Disclaimer: We have no position in Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ: MSFT) and have not been compensated for this article.