Revenue rose 17 percent to $ 43.1 billion in the second fiscal quarter ended December. Analysts had expected around $ 40 billion. The profit jumped year-on-year by 33 percent to 15.5 billion dollars, as the software giant Microsoft announced after the US market closed on Tuesday.
Microsoft boss Satya Nadella aligned the group to cloud services over the long-term core business with the Windows operating system and office programs – the offer of computing power and software from the network.
In the “intelligent cloud” division, sales grew 23 percent to $ 14.6 billion last quarter. A key factor here was a 50 percent increase in business on the Azure cloud platform, with which Microsoft competes with Amazon and Google.
In the Windows and hardware segment, there was a 40 percent jump in sales for the Xbox game console. Windows sales increased by ten percent. Microsoft only mentions the changes in many areas, but not the amount of sales.
The Microsoft share rose in after-hours trading at times by around five percent.
AMD benefits from servers and game consoles
The chip company AMD is benefiting greatly from the growth in the PC market and the expansion of data centers in the corona pandemic. In the past quarter, sales rose 53 percent year-on-year to a good 3.2 billion dollars, as the Intel competitor announced after the US market closed on Tuesday. Profits jumped from $ 170 million a year ago to $ 1.78 billion. Of this, however, about $ 1.3 billion went back to a tax credit.
In the business with PC processors and graphics chips, sales increased by 18 percent to 1.96 billion dollars. The long decline in sales of personal computers increased significantly during the Corona crisis thanks to the high demand for notebooks for home work.
At AMD, however, the division that supplies chips for servers and game consoles grew particularly strongly – from $ 465 million a year ago to just under $ 1.3 billion. In the pandemic, with its sharp increase in video conferencing, among other things, infrastructure providers expanded the capacity of their data centers. Chips from AMD are also in the new consoles from Sony and Microsoft, which came onto the market at the end of last year.
