Microsoft Corp announced on Sunday its record high sales for the quarter ending in September, beating Wall Street predictions on the company's revenue and profit margin as more and more businesses signed up on Azure, its newest cloud computing service offering, and Office 365 software.
The Bill Gates-founded tech company saw an impressive increase of shares since its new chief executive officer, Satya Nadella, sat in the office in 2014, the report from Reuters said. Nadella also took the initiative to shift Microsoft's focus on building data center software and related services, which apparently benefited the firm.
According to the news agency, Microsoft stocks has risen in total by more than 21 percent over the past year and gained 1.9 percent in after-hours trading following the release of its earnings report this week.
Market analysts and watchers are quick to attribute Microsoft's stunning growth to its decision to move into the cloud industry from on-premise data centers.
The current total revenue on commercial cloud service, including the company's brainchild, Azure, has already surpassed the $8 billion profit mark, which is up by close to 50 percent from the same quarter of last year.
Growth margin for this type of data storage business has seen growth by 62 percent, up by 4 percent in the year-ago quarter, and a couple of notches from the last quarter, Reuters added.
As further pointed out by CNN, Microsoft is one of the first major tech companies to release a positive earnings report following the widespread decrease in tech stocks which happen recently this week. In this particular case, experts are pointing out towards the growing concerns on the unprecedented rise of interest rates reportedly caused by the escalating trade war between China and the US.
The four squares company managed to surpass Google in the public cloud market as early as 2016 and is now trailing behind the trillion dollar-worth company, Amazon, the data from Synergy Research Group was cited by CNN.
This upward trend for both Microsoft and Amazon have seen to continue as there's an increase on worldwide spending for public cloud services and infrastructure which is expected to reach $160 billion before this year ends and hit $277 billion in three years time.
Computing and Gaming
Aside from Azure, Microsoft has also brought home the bacon with the upsurging market performance of its tangible consumer products.
According to Engadget, the company's Surface product revenue ballooned 14 percent to 1.2 billion. Its revenue on Xbox and other gaming products hit a surprising 44 percent to $2.7 billion.
