News

Latest Financial News Is Positive for Microsoft

Microsoft's overall revenue was $20.5 billion for the quarter, an 18% increase year-over-year.

Despite recent news of gloom and doom for Windows 8, things appear to be going well for Microsoft.

The company yesterday issued its fiscal third-quarter financial results, delivering positive earnings across all five divisions.

Microsoft also announced that Peter Klein, Microsoft's chief financial officer for four years, will be stepping down. Klein, an 11-year Microsoft veteran, will help with the CFO transition during the next quarter. His replacement will be announced in the next few weeks.

Microsoft's overall revenue was $20.5 billion for the quarter, which ended on March 31, 2013. That figure was up 18%, compared year over year. Net income was $6.1 billion. Diluted earnings per share was $0.72, which was slightly lower than a whispered $0.73 per share.

Microsoft's Business Division brought in the most revenue at $6.3 billion, up 8% compared with last year's Q3 result. Next came the Windows Division, with $5.7 billion in revenue, up 23%. Server and Tools contributed $5.0 billion in revenue, up 11 percent. The Entertainment and Devices Division added $2.5 billion to the revenue mix, representing a whopping 56 percent increase year over year. Trailing the pack was the Online Services Division, with $832 million in revenue, up 18%.

Microsoft also provided non-GAAP revenue figures as a way to explain the performance of its divisions alongside promotional offers, such as the Windows and Office upgrade offers and a video game deferral offer, plus a fine by the European Commission. In March, Microsoft was hit with a $733 million fine for failure to deliver browser choice screens with copies of Windows 7 that were sold in European Union countries.

The company described achieving "double-digit percentage revenue growth in SQL Server and System Center" during the quarter. Xbox Live membership increased 18 percent, year over year, to reach more than 46 million members. Other details went undescribed in Microsoft's announcement. As usual, there were no Windows Phone sales revenue figures given. Surprisingly, there were no new figures announced on Windows 8 copies sold, nor details about Microsoft Surface device sales. In January, Microsoft said it had sold 60 million Windows 8 licenses.

The positive Windows Division revenues were surprising in the wake of a general slide in PC sales, which may or may not be made up by Windows 8 tablet sales. Intel, which had a bad first quarter, pointed to lower priced touch-based Windows 8 notebooks on the horizon, which could possibly boost unit sales, although not necessarily revenues.

About the Author

Kurt Mackie is senior news producer for 1105 Media's Converge360 group.

comments powered by Disqus

Featured

  • Mastering Blazor Authentication and Authorization

    At the Visual Studio Live! @ Microsoft HQ developer conference set for August, Rockford Lhotka will explain the ins and outs of authentication across Blazor Server, WebAssembly, and .NET MAUI Hybrid apps, and show how to use identity and claims to customize application behavior through fine-grained authorization.

  • Linear Support Vector Regression from Scratch Using C# with Evolutionary Training

    Dr. James McCaffrey from Microsoft Research presents a complete end-to-end demonstration of the linear support vector regression (linear SVR) technique, where the goal is to predict a single numeric value. A linear SVR model uses an unusual error/loss function and cannot be trained using standard simple techniques, and so evolutionary optimization training is used.

  • Low-Code Report Says AI Will Enhance, Not Replace DIY Dev Tools

    Along with replacing software developers and possibly killing humanity, advanced AI is seen by many as a death knell for the do-it-yourself, low-code/no-code tooling industry, but a new report belies that notion.

  • Vibe Coding with Latest Visual Studio Preview

    Microsoft's latest Visual Studio preview facilitates "vibe coding," where developers mainly use GitHub Copilot AI to do all the programming in accordance with spoken or typed instructions.

  • Steve Sanderson Previews AI App Dev: Small Models, Agents and a Blazor Voice Assistant

    Blazor creator Steve Sanderson presented a keynote at the recent NDC London 2025 conference where he previewed the future of .NET application development with smaller AI models and autonomous agents, along with showcasing a new Blazor voice assistant project demonstrating cutting-edge functionality.

Subscribe on YouTube