Microsoft shares slipped during late trading overnight, despite better-than-estimated financial results from the software company in the latest quarter, Yahoo! Finance reported Wednesday.
Microsoft's stock fell more than 3% following the release of its financial results. The company extended its pandemic-propelled run of solid quarterly earnings that have lifted investor interest in the software company, bringing Microsoft near the $2 trillion valuation.
The company's main growth driver, and the component of its business that has pushed its market valuation to the $2 trillion level, is its Azure Cloud unit. For the current quarter, Microsoft earned $41.71 billion, against $41.03 billion Wall Street has expected, figures by Refinitiv show.
"We're building the Cloud for the next decade, expanding our addressable market and innovating across every layer of the tech stack to help our customers be resilient and transform," Microsoft chief executive officer Satya Nadella said in a statement.
Revenue from Microsoft's Productivity and Businesses Processes segment increased 15% to $13.5 billion, courtesy of robust sales in commercial operating system products like Office 365 and Dynamics 365, which rallied more than 20% and 45%, respectively.
In a research report prior to Microsoft's earnings disclosure, Wedbush analyst Dan Ives wrote, "the cloud shift is just beginning to take its next phase of growth globally, with workforces seen to have a massive remote focus on the other side of a COVID-19 vaccine being deployed."
According to a statement, Microsoft reported nearly 20% annualized sales growth for the current quarter ending March 31. The figure represents the largest quarterly growth Microsoft has posted since 2018, thanks in part to gains in PC revenues as a result of pandemic-driven shortfall last year.
