Microsoft Q2 Results Trounce Street View

(RTTNews) - Software giant Microsoft Corp. (MSFT), Wednesday reported a profit and revenue for the second quarter that beat Wall Street analysts' estimates driven by growth in cloud business.

Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft reported second-quarter profit of $11.65 billion or $1.51 per share, up from last year's profit of $8.42 billion or $1.08 per share. On average, 29 analysts polled by Thomson Reuters expected earnings of $1.32 per share for the quarter.

Revenues for the quarter grew 14 percent to $36.91 billion from $32.47 billion last year. Analysts had a consensus revenue estimate of $35.67 billion for the quarter.

"Strong execution from our sales teams and partners drove Commercial Cloud revenue to $12.5 billion, up 39% year over year," said Amy Hood, executive vice president and chief financial officer of Microsoft.

Intelligent Cloud segment revenues, which includes its Azure on-demand computing services, increased 27 percent to $11.9 billion, with Azure revenues surging 62 percent.

Revenues in Productivity and Business Processes rose 17 percent to $11.8 billion, with office commercial products and cloud services revenue up 16 percent driven by Office 365 commercial revenue growth of 27 percent.

Revenues in More Personal Computing segment, which includes Windows operating system, increased 2 percent to $13.2 billion.

MSFT closed Wednesday's trading at $168.04, up $2.58 or 1.56%, on the Nasdaq. The stock further gained $4.96 or 2.95% in the after-hours trading.