Software giant Microsoft said that it will get its loss-making Nokia phone unit to break even within two years.
Bringing in Nokia into the Vole hill cost Microsoft a seven percent dip in quarterly profit and Redmonds chief financial Vole Amy Hood said that the company plans to take $1 billion in costs out of the Nokia operation and stop its losses by fiscal 2016 following massive job cuts announced last week.
This statement pacified the cocaine nose jobs of Wall Street who did not expect Vole to act that quickly to stop Nokia haemorrhaging Microsoft’s bottom line.
Microsoft shares hit new 14-year highs over the past week, and were up 1.1 percent at $45.33 after hours.
Nokia’s Lumia smartphones, while well-reviewed, have not been as successful as Microsoft hoped, capturing no more than four percent of the global market. Lumia sales hit 5.8 million for the nine weeks of the quarter that Nokia was part of Microsoft.
Vole is in the process of drastically reducing Nokia’s operation, closing some facilities and cutting about half of its 25,000 workforce, as it looks to rein in costs and refocus on cloud-computing.
The fact that the PC market recovered after two years of declines, helped sales of Microsoft’s core Windows and Office products in the quarter.
Overall quarterly revenue rose 17 percent to $23.38 billion, above analysts’ average estimate of $23 billion, although the bulk of that was due to the addition of sales from Nokia.
Microsoft reported fiscal fourth-quarter profit of $4.61 billion compared with $4.96 billion last year.
