Microsoft posted a 25% sales bump in its most recent quarter, beating Wall Street predictions on the strength of improved personal-computer sales as well as added revenue from the mobile phone business that the company Microsoft acquired from Nokia for $7.5 billion earlier this year. Here are the key points from Thursday’s Microsoft earnings report.
What you need to know: Sales improved to $23.2 billion in the first quarter of its 2015 fiscal year, which was also Satya Nadella‘s second full quarter as CEO of the company. But at the same time, Microsoft’s profits dipped more than 13%, to $4.5 billion, or 55 cents per share. The drop in profits was attributed to a $1.1 billion charge the company took in connection with massive layoffs, first announced over the summer, along with some ongoing costs of integrating Nokia’s handset business.
Microsoft got $2.6 billion from phone hardware sales in the most recent quarter, thanks to its new handset business, while the company’s unit that handles corporate sales grew revenue by 10% overall to $12.3 billion. The latter figure includes a 2.7% bump for commercial licensing sales, which cover server programs and corporate Windows and Office products.
The big number: Nadella has been putting a lot of focus toward selling Microsoft’s cloud-based business services, and the company said Thursday that its commercial cloud revenue, including sales from Office 365 and Azure cloud platform, grew 128% in the first quarter. Overall, the company reported a 50% jump in sales for its “Commercial Other” line, which includes the cloud products, to $2.41 billion. This is a closely-watched part of Microsoft’s business, as investors want to be sure that the tech giant is nimble and modern enough to be a big player in the cloud services market. Microsoft’s shares (MSFT) jumped almost 4% in after-hours trading, so it seems like investors were pleased with the company’s efforts.
What you might have missed: Microsoft also reported a 74% first-quarter revenue increase, to roughly $2.5 billion, for its computing and gaming hardware segment, reflecting sales growth for the company’s Xbox gaming console as well as the market-wide rebound in PC sales. Microsoft revealed Thursday that it sold 2.4 million Xbox consoles during the first quarter, representing a 102% bump. However, the company did not specify whether those sales came from the new Xbox One, which launched in 28 new markets during the quarter, as opposed to older iterations of the gaming system.
