The booming cloud business with IT services keeps the software giant Microsoft on the road to success. In the past fiscal quarter, profit increased by 30 percent compared to the same period in the previous year. The group significantly exceeds the expectations of Wall Street analysts.
The world's largest software company Microsoft is benefiting from the trend towards working from home triggered by the corona pandemic. The digitization and application of cloud services accelerated by the crisis caused sales to climb by twelve percent to 37.2 billion dollars in the past quarter, as the US company announced after the market closed.
Since the outbreak of the pandemic, Microsoft has not only scored with its cloud solutions and the Teams program for cross-location work, but also with old blockbusters such as the Windows operating system, which is newly installed on laptops, and the XBox game console.
The career network LinkedIn, which also belongs to Microsoft, increased its revenues by 16 percent. After unsuccessful efforts to buy the TikTok short video app, Microsoft swallowed US game developer ZeniMax Media in September for $ 7.5 billion, which includes successful titles such as "Doom" and "Fallout".
The cloud business is booming
Microsoft benefits from the fact that the Redmond company has been expanding its cloud business for many quarters and is now benefiting from the fact that more and more companies are foregoing their own expensive data centers. Instead, they prefer to use the services of cloud platforms, which provide them with storage space and applications on external servers. With Azure, Microsoft has risen to number two in the market behind AWS from Amazon.
In the first fiscal quarter at the end of September, Azure went up 48 percent. On Thursday, Google and Amazon, among others, will publish their figures and give an insight into the past quarter. On Wednesday the competitors – in contrast to Microsoft – have to take part in a hearing before a US Senate committee and answer questions about market power, among other things.
The Microsoft share rose after hours by one percent. Both sales and profits, which rose 30 percent to $ 13.9 billion, were above analysts' expectations. This year the company has increased its market value by a third to $ 1.6 trillion.
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