Microsoft Results Beat Street View Driven By Strong Azure Growth

(RTTNews) - Software giant Microsoft Corp. (MSFT), Wednesday reported a profit and revenue for the first quarter that beat Wall Street analysts' estimates driven by growth in cloud business.

Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft reported first-quarter profit of $10.68 billion or $1.38 per share, up from last year's profit of $8.82 billion or $1.14 per share. On average, 29 analysts polled by Thomson Reuters expected earnings of $1.24 per share for the quarter.

Revenues for the quarter grew 14 percent to $33.06 billion from $29.08 billion last year. Analysts had a consensus revenue estimate of $32.23 billion for the quarter.

"It was a strong start to the fiscal year with our commercial cloud generating $11.6 billion in revenue for the quarter, up 36% year over year," said Amy Hood, executive vice president and chief financial officer of Microsoft.

Intelligent Cloud segment revenues, which includes its Azure on-demand computing services, increased 27 percent to $10.8 billion, with Azure revenues surging 59 percent.

Revenues in Productivity and Business Processes rose 13 percent to $11.1 billion, with office commercial products and cloud services revenue up 13 percent driven by Office 365 commercial revenue growth of 25 percent.

Revenues in More Personal Computing segment, which includes Windows operating system, increased 4 percent to $11.1 billion.

MSFT closed Wednesday's trading at $137.24, up $0.87 or 0.64%, on the Nasdaq. The stock, however, dropped $0.69 or 0.50% in the after-hours trade.