Microsoft Earnings Up 13% in Q4
Microsoft revenues were up 13% in the fourth quarter as the company continued its growth amid the pandemic and associated economic headwinds.
Revenues for the quarter, ended June 30, hit $38 billion. Diluted earnings per share decreased 15%, to $1.46, in part because the company took a $450 million charge in the quarter for its late-June move to permanently shutter the Microsoft Store physical locations.
Microsoft's stock price was down about 3% in after-hours trading, even though both the revenues and earnings announced Wednesday beat analyst expectations.
"Our commercial cloud surpassed $50 billion in annual revenue for the first time this year. And this quarter our Commercial bookings were better than expected, growing 12% year-over-year," Microsoft CFO Amy Hood said in a statement.
For the full year, revenue grew 14% to $143 billion and diluted earnings per share were also up 14% to $5.76.
Despite the cloud growth, investors may have been concerned about the sequential drop in Azure growth. While Microsoft does not break out Azure revenues, the company reports percentage growth. In the third quarter, Azure growth had been 59%, while the fourth quarter brought 47% growth.
By major business units for the quarter, Productivity and Business Process was up 6% to $11.8 billion, Intelligent Cloud was up 17% to $13.4 billion and More Personal Computing was up 14% to $12.9 billion.
Other notable growth trends in Microsoft's business-oriented product lines included:
- A 19% jump in Office 365 Commercial revenues
- Growth of 38% for Dynamics 365 revenue
- An increase of 19% in server products and cloud services revenue, which included the 47% Azure revenue growth
- Growth of 7% in Windows OEM revenue
- A 28% hike in Surface revenues
Posted by Scott Bekker on July 22, 2020