Microsoft Q4 Profit, Revenues Beat Street View

(RTTNews) - Microsoft Corp. (MSFT), Wednesday reported a profit and revenue for the fourth quarter that trumped Wall Street analysts' estimates.

Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft said its fourth-quarter profit dropped to $11.20 billion or $1.46 per share from last year's profit of $13.19 billion or $1.71 per share. On average, 29 analysts polled by Thomson Reuters expected earnings of $1.37 per share for the quarter.

Revenues for the quarter grew 13 percent to $38.03 billion from $33.72 billion last year. Analysts had a consensus revenue estimate of $36.50 billion for the quarter.

"Our commercial cloud surpassed $50 billion in annual revenue for the first time this year. And this quarter our Commercial bookings were better than expected, growing 12% year-over-year," said Amy Hood, executive vice president and chief financial officer of Microsoft. "As we drive growth across the company, we remain committed to investing in long-term strategic opportunities."

Revenue in Productivity and Business Processes increased 6% to $11.8 billion, with office commercial products and cloud services revenue up 5 percent driven by Office 365 commercial revenue growth of 19 percent.

Intelligent Cloud segment revenues, which includes its Azure on-demand computing services, increased 17 percent to $13.4 billion, with Azure revenues surging 47 percent.

Revenues in More Personal Computing segment, which includes Windows operating system, increased 14 percent to $12.9 billion.

MSFT closed Wednesday's trading at $211.75, up $3.00 or 1.44%, on the Nasdaq. The stock, however, dropped $6.05 or 2.86 in the after-hours trade.