Microsoft posted strong second quarter figures, showing a sizable increase to both revenues and profits as a shift to remote working continues.
Revenues surged by 17 percent year on year to $43.1 billion while operating income grew by 29 percent to $17.9 billion.
In a webcast following the results, CEO Satya Nadella told investors that we are amid “the dawn of a second wave of digital transformation sweeping every company and every industry”.
The figures showed that Azure, Dynamics 365 and Office 365 were boosted by work from home economy and this lifted Microsoft’s second quarter and highlighted the strength of its cloud offerings.
Microsoft’s ‘Commercial Cloud’ segment surpassed $16 billion in revenues for the quarter, up 34 percent year on year.
The four fastest-growing segments for Microsoft in Q2 were Azure (50 percent year on year growth), Xbox content and services (40 percent), Dynamics 365 (39 percent) and server products and cloud services (26 percent). Meanwhile commercial Office 365 sales ballooned by 21 percent, while sales from LinkedIn grew by 23 percent.
Nadella collapsed in joy and said that Vole was investing to meet these needs in the coming decade, and was optimistic about what’s ahead.
Satya Nadella recently suggested that Teams could become as important to businesses as the internet itself and was evolving beyond just a video conferencing tool.
Nadella told investors that Teams is rapidly becoming “the de facto unified communications platform of choice for every organisation”.
He claims 117 organisations have more than 100,000 users on Teams and more than 2,700 businesses now have more than 10,000 users adopting the software. Almost 60 million daily active users are using Teams on mobile alone.
Nadella added that the biggest breakthrough for Teams was expanding to become a key component in other Microsoft products.
“It brings together chat, it brings together meetings, Office collaboration as well as business processes workflow all into one scaffolding. That’s the biggest breakthrough of Teams. In the past, obviously, we had a suite of tools, but this is the first product more so than Outlook was even, in terms of being able to integrate communications, collaboration and business process”, he said.
Microsoft was benefitting from a wave of new business for its OEM business last year thanks to Windows 10 refreshes and the end of life of Windows 7, god rest its soul, if it ever had one.
Microsoft’s overall OEM business actually beat expectations in the second quarter with revenues up a percent.
The wider More Personal Computing segment reported 14 per cent growth during the quarter to $15.1 billion driven by Xbox sales and Windows Commercial products and cloud services. Surface revenues also improved in Q2 with three percent revenue growth.
