Satya Nadella, CEO, Microsoft, has put cloud computing at the centre of Microsoft’s strategy and it certainly seems to work, at least, when it comes to attracting investors.
On Thursday, the company said its revenue and profit fell in the last quarter, however, this doesn’t make much of a difference as it made more from cloud computing with the stocks increasing by more than five percent after the release of the numbers.
There were a lot of good and bad sides to the results that came out from Microsoft’s practices. On the negative side, Microsoft is suffering due to floundering personal computer business, which is hurting profits from longtime Microsoft software businesses, especially Windows, while on the positive side, the flourishing cloud business gives hopes to the investors that the company will retain its relevance at least for some years to come.
Under Satya Nadella, the Redmond giant has developed and the stocks are back in the favour with the investors. Even with the recent issues in the stock market, Microsoft’s shares are up more than 28 percent compared to the last season, while shares in rivals like Apple, Oracle and IBM have declined by double digits.
As for the figures, in its first fiscal quarters, which ended on 31 December, the net income that was reported is nearly $5 billion, or 62 cents a share, compared with $5.86 billion, or 71 cents a share, during the same period a year earlier. The revenue also fell down, from $26.47 billion a year ago, to $23.8 billion.
Nevertheless, the company’s intelligent cloud group, which includes its Azure service, rose five percent to $6.3 billion. In total, as of now, there are 20.6 million subscribers to Office 365, the cloud version of its productivity applications, up from 9.2 million a year earlier, which is definitely a substantial increase considering all factors that are involved and does look a lot promising.