Microsoft Corp. MSFT-Q beat Wall Street estimates for fiscal second-quarter revenue on Tuesday, as new AI features helped attract customers to its cloud and Windows services.
Microsoft shares were down 1.2 per cent in volatile after-hours trading. The stock climbed 57 per cent last year. Along with a rally in other tech stocks, including Alphabet Inc. GOOGL-Q and Nvidia Corp. NVDA-Q, Microsoft helped fuel a 24-per-cent surge in the S&P 500 in 2023.
“We’ve moved from talking about AI to applying AI at scale,” chief executive Satya Nadella said in a statement. “By infusing AI across every layer of our tech stack, we’re winning new customers and helping drive new benefits and productivity gains across every sector.”
Investors are watching Microsoft’s Azure and Office revenues closely to see what kind of sales flow come from the tens of billions of dollars the company plans to pour into data centres this year to deliver generative AI.
Total revenue grew 18 per cent to US$62-billion in the quarter ended Dec. 31, compared with the average analyst estimate of US$61.12-billion, according to LSEG data. Adjusted profit of US$2.93 per share beat an average estimate of US$2.78 per share.
Revenue at Microsoft’s Intelligent Cloud unit, which houses the Azure cloud computing platform, grew 20 per cent to US$25.9-billion. Sales of Azure, for which Microsoft does not disclose a dollar figure, grew 30 per cent – its best growth rate in four quarters – compared with a 27.7-per-cent consensus estimate from Visible Alpha, and outstripping a 25.7-per-cent growth in Google Cloud.
Brett Iversen, Microsoft’s vice-president for investor relations, told Reuters that six percentage points of Azure’s growth rate in the second quarter was attributable to AI. That is double the three percentage points in the first quarter.
Sales at Microsoft’s More Personal Computing segment, which includes its Windows operating system and gaming business, grew 19 per cent to US$16.9-billion, powered in part by the close of its US$69-billion purchase of Call of Duty maker Activision Blizzard. Analysts had expected US$16.8-billion.
Microsoft’s Productivity and Business Process segment, which contains the LinkedIn social network in addition to Office sales, reported that sales rose 13 per cent to US$19.2-billion, just beating estimates.
AI-POWERED SURGE
While analysts have said that any meaningful gains from AI may not come before next year, investors have rewarded the company’s push into AI and strategic partnership with Silicon Valley startup and ChatGPT creator OpenAI.
In November, Microsoft started selling Copilot, an AI assistant that can summarize an e-mail inbox or craft a slide show, for $30 per month, which analysts say is a premium price.
Early sales of the product showed up in the firm’s commercial sales of Office software, where revenue grew 17%, compared with analyst expectations of commercial Office sales growth of 14.2%, according to data from Visible Alpha. Microsoft does not provide an absolute dollar figure for the sales.
Iversen said on Tuesday that Office’s commercial offerings, where Copilot is being sold, now stand at 400 million paid seats, up from 382 million in April 2023.
The company’s capital expenditures grew by $300 million from the previous quarter to $11.5 billion, putting the company on track to spend more than $46 billion this fiscal year.
“That’s a sign of the customer demand that we’re seeing,” Iversen said.
Microsoft’s stock surge has helped it topple Apple as the world’s most valuable listed company in the past few trading sessions. That was undented by a power struggle within OpenAI that highlighted the software giant’s lack of direct control over its important partner. Microsoft also faces some legal and regulatory challenges.