Microsoft Q3 Profit, Revenues Beat Street - Update

(RTTNews) - Microsoft Corp. (MSFT), Wednesday reported a profit and revenue for the third quarter that easily trumped Wall Street analysts' estimates, as the software giant reaped benefits of thousands of people working from home due to ongoing COVID-19 crisis.

Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft reported third-quarter profit of $10.75 billion or $1.40 per share, up from last year's profit of $8.81 billion or $1.14 per share. On average, 26 analysts polled by Thomson Reuters expected earnings of $1.26 per share for the quarter.

Revenues for the quarter grew 15 percent to $35.02 billion from $30.57 billion last year. Analysts had a consensus revenue estimate of $33.66 billion for the quarter.

The company said the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic had minimal impact on the total revenues for the third quarter.

"In this dynamic environment, our sales teams and partners executed a solid third quarter, with Commercial Cloud revenue generating $13.3 billion, up 39% year over year," said CFO Amy Hood. "We?remain committed to?balancing?operational discipline?with continued investments?in key strategic areas to drive future growth."

In the Productivity and Business Processes and Intelligent Cloud segments, cloud usage increased, particularly in Microsoft 365 including Teams, Azure, Windows Virtual Desktop, advanced security solutions, and Power Platform, as customers shifted to work and learn from home.

Intelligent Cloud segment revenues, which includes its Azure on-demand computing services, increased 27 percent to $12.3 billion, with Azure revenues surging 59 percent.

Revenues in Productivity and Business Processes rose 15 percent to $11.7 billion, with office commercial products and cloud services revenue up 13 percent driven by Office 365 commercial revenue growth of 25 percent.

Revenues in More Personal Computing segment, which includes Windows operating system, increased 3 percent to $11.0 billion.

MSFT closed Wednesday's trading at $177.43, up $7.62 or 4.49%, on the Nasdaq. The stock further gained $6.62 or 3.73% in the after-hours trade.