Microsoft reported another strong earnings period with revenue hitting $43.1 billion during the second quarter of fiscal 2021, up 17% from a year ago, and driven by pandemic-fueled cloud computing and gaming.
“It was a record quarter, driven by our commercial cloud, which surpassed $16 billion in revenue, up 34% year over year,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said on a call with investors Tuesday. “What we’re witnessing is the dawn of a second wave of digital transformation sweeping every company and every industry.”
Indeed, pandemic life, with its remote work, school, and play, has been a boon for Microsoft — as well as its cloud rivals Amazon and Google, which both report their quarterly earnings next week.
For the quarter that ended Dec. 31, Microsoft reported net income increased 33% year over year to $15.5 billion.
Revenue from the company’s Intelligent Cloud segment, which include Azure public cloud, Windows Server, GitHub, and enterprise services grew 23% year over year to $14.6 billion. Azure revenue grew 50%, but Microsoft doesn’t disclose its public cloud’s revenue in dollars.
Meanwhile, revenue from Microsoft’s Productivity and Business Processes hit $13.4 billion, up 13% year over year. This includes its Office Commercial product and cloud services, which grew 11%, LinkedIn revenue (up 23%), Dynamics enterprise resource planning and customer relationship management software (up 21%), and Teams.
Microsoft didn’t disclose Teams-specific revenue on the call. It did, however, use the video conferencing platform to broadcast the earnings call, and Teams crashed about seven minutes in due to “technical difficulties” before picking back up about 10 minutes later with Nadella in mid-sentence, noting how “more than 500,000 employees at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs including health care workers use Teams to collaborate.”
Security is another area where Microsoft shone in Q2 with security business revenue skyrocketing more than 40% and surpassing $10 billion over the past 12 months, Nadella said. He pointed to the recent SolarWinds attack, which hit Microsoft along with several other tech companies and government agencies, as “a stark reminder of how critical security is to our customers.”
Microsoft shares increased more than 4% in after-hours trading following its earnings announcement.
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