Microsoft beat Wall Street’s estimates for third-quarter revenue and profit on Tuesday, driven by growth in its cloud computing and Office productivity software businesses. . The company has 3,500 employees in Ireland.
Shares gained 4.6 per cent in after-market trading following a report by Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft that profits were $2.45 (€2.23 per share, beating Wall Street estimates of $2.23, according to data from Refinitiv and up 10 per cent from the same quarter last year.
Revenue rose 7 per cent to $52.9 billion in the quarter ended in March, inching past the average analyst estimate of $51.02 billion, according to Refinitiv. The bulk of Microsoft sales still come from selling software and cloud computing services to customers, even though the company has grabbed headlines this year with its partnership with ChatGPT creator OpenAI and sprucing up the Bing search engine with artificial intelligence technology.
“It’s really early and so the excitement is very high and the innovation is definitely happening,” Brett Iversen, Microsoft’s head of investor relations, said. However he said AI is still a relatively small part of Microsoft’s total business.
Microsoft said growth at its cloud business Azure was 27 per cent in the latest reported quarter beating analyst expectations for 26.6 per cent growth, according to the consensus from 23 analysts polled by Visible Alpha.
That was despite a continued challenging overall macroeconomic environment, said Mr Iversen. “Overall I would say environment felt similar to Q2,” he said.
Analysts had expected a gloomy economic outlook to hit Microsoft’s Windows business, which depends heavily on PC sales that have sagged in recent quarters. The sales drop in the segment was less severe than analysts expected, with Microsoft reporting revenue of $13.3 billion versus analyst estimates of $12.19 billion, according to Refinitiv data. – Reuters
