Microsoft Q1 Results Trump Wall Street View

(RTTNews) - Microsoft Corp. (MSFT), Tuesday reported its first-quarter results with both earnings and revenues beating Wall Street analysts' estimates, driven by its cloud business.

Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft said its first-quarter profit rose to $13.89 billion or $1.82 per share from last year's profit of $10.68 billion or $1.38 per share. On average, 27 analysts polled by Thomson Reuters expected earnings of $1.54 per share for the quarter.

Revenues for the quarter grew 12 percent to $37.15 billion from $33.06 billion last year. Analysts had a consensus revenue estimate of $35.72 billion for the quarter.

"Demand for our cloud offerings drove a strong start to the fiscal year with our commercial cloud revenue generating $15.2 billion, up 31% year over year," said CFO Amy Hood. "We continue to invest against the significant opportunity ahead of us to drive long-term growth."

Intelligent Cloud segment revenues, which includes its Azure on-demand computing services, increased 20 percent to $13.0 billion, with Azure revenues surging 48 percent.

Revenue in Productivity and Business Processes increased 11% to $12.3 billion, with office commercial products and cloud services revenue up 9 percent driven by Office 365 commercial revenue growth of 21 percent.

Revenues in More Personal Computing segment, which includes Windows operating system, increased 6 percent to $11.8 billion.

MSFT closed Tuesday's trading at $213.25, up $3.17 or 1.51%, on the Nasdaq. The stock further gained $1.07 or 0.50% in the after-hours trade.