Microsoft Q2 Results Trounce Street View On Cloud Growth; Shares Up 5%

(RTTNews) - Microsoft Corp. (MSFT), Tuesday reported its second-quarter results with both earnings and revenues trumping Wall Street analysts' estimates, driven by especially by its cloud business. Shares gained 5% in extended trading session.

Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft said its second-quarter profit rose to $15.46 billion or $2.03 per share from last year's profit of $11.65 billion or $1.51 per share. On average, 27 analysts polled by Thomson Reuters expected earnings of $1.64 per share for the quarter.

Revenues for the quarter grew 17 percent to $43.08 billion from $36.91 billion last year. Analysts had a consensus revenue estimate of $40.18 billion for the quarter.

"Accelerating demand for our differentiated offerings drove commercial cloud revenue to $16.7 billion, up 34% year over year," said Amy Hood, executive vice president and chief financial officer of Microsoft. "We continue to benefit from our investments in strategic, high-growth areas."

Intelligent Cloud segment revenues, which includes its Azure on-demand computing services, increased 23 percent to $14.60 billion, with Azure revenues surging 50 percent.

Revenue in Productivity and Business Processes increased 13% to $13.35 billion, with office commercial products and cloud services revenue up 11 percent driven by Office 365 commercial revenue growth of 21 percent.

Revenues in More Personal Computing segment, which includes Windows operating system, increased 14 percent to $15.12 billion.

MSFT closed Tuesday's trading at $232.33, up $2.80 or 1.22%, on the Nasdaq. The stock further gained $11.27 or 4.85% in the after-hours trade.