Beating street estimates by a fair bit of margin, Microsoft today announced its fiscal fourth quarter financial performance, wherein the company reported revenues of $22.2 Billion, with an EPS of $0.62, beating street estimates on both fronts.
Microsoft had operating income of negative $2.1 billion in the quarter. Analysts at the Wall Street and elsewhere had expected Microsoft to report $0.56 in per-share, adjusted profit, on revenue of $22.06 billion.
While beating expectations, Microsoft’s revenue fell sharply by 5 percent as compared to the very same period in the previous year. Last year, MS had reported revenues worth $23.382 Billion. Th loss can largely be attributed to Microsoft’s ever-declining smartphone business, which it took over from Nokia last year.
Using normal accounting methods, Microsoft lost $3.2 billion in quarter, or $0.40 per share, both in star contrasts with previous year’s performance. The Redmond giant had recorded a $4.2 Billion profit in the same quarter a year ago.
All in all, Microsoft ended up with more than $96 billion in cash and equivalents.
Microsoft reported a sharp 22 percent fall in its incomes from selling Windows to OEMs, as compared to a year ago. However, this figure is negative largely because of Windows XP seeing its end. We could see a huge bump in the coming quarter, considering Windows 10 launch is just round the corneR.
Office 365 continued to see robust growth, with Microsoft raking in 2.8 million new consumer Office 365 subscribers, taking the total tally to 15.2 Million subscriber, one of the largest when it comes to paid software subscriptions in enterprise space.
On the cloud front, specially commercial cloud Microsoft predicted a heavy $20 billion revenue run rate inside the next two years.
Lastly, Microsoft’s Surface series of tablets, which are unarguably the best piece of hardware to have come out from the Redmond giant, brought in $888 Million in revenues for the company, resulting in a 117 percent growth rate as compared to the year-ago period.
