Microsoft Nears $37B in Revenues in Q2
Microsoft beat Wall Street expectations on revenues and earnings in second quarter results released Wednesday after the close of markets.
The company reported revenues of $36.9 billion and diluted earnings per share of $1.51. The revenue figure exceeded consensus expectations of $35.68 billion and represented an increase of 14% over the year-ago quarter. EPS topped consensus expectations of $1.32 per share and was 40% above the year-ago quarter.
"We are innovating across every layer of our differentiated technology stack and leading in key secular areas that are critical to our customers' success," Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said in a statement released with the earnings numbers. "Along with our expanding opportunity, we are working to ensure the technology we build is inclusive, trusted and creates a more sustainable world, so every person and every organization can benefit."
Nadella's mention of a sustainable world refers to a major new carbon-reduction effort that the company unveiled two weeks ago. The initiative was announced two weeks after the close of Microsoft's second quarter, which covers the last three months of calendar 2019, but it is likely to carry expenses in coming quarters. Microsoft's stated plan is to become carbon-neutral by 2030, then go carbon negative in an effort remove all the carbon from the atmosphere that the company has emitted since its founding in 1975.
Revenues for each of Microsoft's three major business units also exceeded consensus Wall Street expectations. Productivity and Business Processes hit $11.8 billion, a 17% jump over the year-ago quarter. Intelligent Cloud revenue was $11.9 billion, up by 27% over the previous Q2. More Personal Computing revenue inched up to $13.2 billion, a 2% gain from the year-ago quarter.
Here are other notable results for individual product and service lines (all percentages represent year-over-year comparisons unless otherwise noted):
- Azure revenue was up 62%. The healthy double-digit growth rate for Azure has been slowly ticking downward quarter-by-quarter as the overall size of the business gets substantially larger. For example, a year ago the growth rate was 76%. In the fourth quarter it was 64%, and the previous sequential quarter (Q1) it was 63%.
- Xbox content and services represented the only major segment with a decline. Revenues dropped 11%.
- Commercial Cloud revenues were up 39% to $12.5 billion.
- Office Commercial products and cloud services revenues jumped 16%.
- Office Consumer products and cloud services revenues were up 19%.
- Office 365 Consumer subscribers reached 37.2 million.
- LinkedIn revenues were up 24%.
- Dynamics products and cloud services revenues rose 12%.
- Windows OEM revenues were up 18%.
- Windows Commercial products and cloud services revenues were up 25%.
- Surface revenue was up 6%.
Posted by Scott Bekker on 01/29/2020 at 9:29 AM