Microsoft hits $1-tn mark on strong Q3 results

Redmond (Washington):Microsoft stock hit $1-trillion mark after the company announced impressive third quarter results, riding on the success of its Azure Cloud as big enterprises moved to Azure infrastructure.

The company posted revenue of $30.6 billion (an increase of 14 per cent from the year-ago quarter) and net income of $8.8 billion (an increase of 19 per cent).

Microsoft shares climbed past $130.50 at the end of trading on Wednesday, pushing the company's market cap over $1 trillion.

"Leading organisations of every size in every industry trust the Microsoft cloud.

"We are accelerating our innovation across the cloud and edge so our customers can build the digital capability increasingly required to compete and grow," said Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.

Microsoft returned $7.4 billion to shareholders in the form of share repurchases and dividends in the third quarter of fiscal year 2019.

"Demand for our cloud offerings drove commercial cloud revenue to $9.6 billion this quarter, up 41 per cent year-over-year,a said Amy Hood, executive vice president and chief financial officer of Microsoft.

The Pentagon has selected Microsoft and Amazon Web Services (AWS, the cloud computing arm of Amazon, as two finalists for its $10 billion Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) cloud contract.

Revenue in Productivity and Business Processes hit $10.2 billion and increased 14 per cent.

"Office Commercial products and cloud services revenue increased 12 per cent, driven by Office 365 Commercial revenue growth of 30 per cent," announced the company.

Office 365 Consumer subscriber base increased to 34.2 million.

Revenue in Intelligent Cloud was $9.7 billion and increased 22 per cent.

"Server products and cloud services revenue increased 27 per cent, driven by Azure revenue growth of 73 per cent.

Revenue in Personal Computing hit $10.7 billion. "Windows OEM revenue increased 9 per cent while Windows Commercial products and cloud services revenue increased 18 per cent.

The revenue of Surface notebook increased 21 per cent.

"Gaming revenue increased 5 per cent driven by Xbox software and services revenue growth.

The revenue of Microsoft-owned professional networking service LinkedIn soared 27 per cent.