Microsoft (MSFT) Delivers Another Strong Quarter

Microsoft Corp (NASDAQ:MSFT), founded in 1975, is one of the most valuable companies in the world with a market cap hovering around $1.9 trillion. Its operations range from cloud computing and gaming consoles to office productivity and connectivity applications. The company is an undisputed winner in office productivity software. Its most widely used apps include Word, PowerPoint, and Excel, which are considered industry standards for document creation, preparing presentations, and analyzing data.

The Washington-based software maker giant on Tuesday announced better-than-expected financial results for the third quarter, driven by improved PC and gaming console sales as well as the growing use of cloud-based services. Microsoft reported earnings of $2.03 per share for the quarter ended March 31, well above $1.40 per share in the comparable period of 2020. On an adjusted basis, the company earned $1.95 per share, higher than the consensus forecast of $1.78 per share.

Revenue came in at $41.7 billion, up 19 percent from the year-ago quarter. Analysts on average were expecting Microsoft to report revenue of $41.04 billion. If we look at the performance of key segments in the quarter, Intelligent Cloud revenue climbed 23 percent to $15.1 billion, revenue from the Productivity and Business Processes segment rose 15 percent to $13.6 billion, while revenue from the Personal Computing segment jumped 19 percent to $13.0 billion.

Speaking on the results, CEO Satya Nadella said in a statement, “Over a year into the pandemic, digital adoption curves aren’t slowing down. They’re accelerating, and it’s just the beginning. We are building the cloud for the next decade, expanding our addressable market and innovating across every layer of the tech stack to help our customers be resilient and transform.”