Microsoft Shares Move Higher on Earnings and Revenue Beat

Shares of tech giant Microsoft were on the move north on an earnings and revenue beat in the company’s latest financial report. The company beat expectations on the top and bottom lines.

For the first quarter, Microsoft revealed earnings of $1.38 a share, excluding certain items. Analysts according to Refinitiv had been expecting $1.25 a share.

Revenue at $33.06 billion was also ahead of the $32.23 billion that was expected by analysts according to Refinitiv.

The company’s Azure public cloud business delivered 59% revenue growth, which was a decrease from the 64% growth in the last quarter.

“We do continue to expect Azure, especially on the consumption side, gross margins to improve,” Amy Hood, Microsoft’s chief financial officer, told analysts on a Wednesday conference call.

35.6 million people now subscribe to Office 365 for consumers, up from 32.5 million last year.

“The world’s leading companies are choosing our cloud to build their digital capability,” said Satya Nadella, chief executive officer of Microsoft. “We are accelerating our innovation across the entire tech stack to deliver new value for customers and investing in large and growing markets with expansive opportunity.”

“It was a strong start to the fiscal year with our commercial cloud generating $11.6 billion in revenue for the quarter, up 36% year over year,” said Amy Hood, executive vice president and chief financial officer of Microsoft.
Jefferies’ William Blair wrote that Microsoft should be able “to weather any storm.”

According to Blair, Microsoft “continues to fire on virtually all cylinders,” and praised its “broad-based product strength.”

Disclaimer: We have no position in Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ: MSFT) and have not been compensated for this article.