Microsoft FY2014 Q4 Earnings: Revenues Up, Profits Down Slightly

Microsoft has released their latest earnings report, and it's not as bleak as last week's news might have you suspect. Quoting Forbes: Microsoft reported $23.38 billion of revenue for the fourth quarter, up 17.5% from the same period last year. Net income, however, came in at $4.6 billion, down from last year and behind Wall Street analysts' consensus estimate, both about $5 billion. At 55 cents earnings per share were down 4 cents and a nickel short of the Street’s call. For the full year, revenue clocked in at $86.8 billion an 11.5% increase from a year earlier. Net income was $22.1 billion and earnings per share were $2.63. They took a hit from finalizing the acquisition of Nokia's handset division (not unexpected). The cloud services side of the business appears to be growing, while traditional software sales have stagnated. The layoffs will cost Microsoft between $1.1 and $1.6 billion over the first half of next year.

Comments

Re:This must be confusing to y'all

[HerculesMO]

If you are tracking a company's performance by its stock price it's kind of laughable; share holders are a mentally unstable bunch, and unless you sacrifice your company for short term profits they really don't get excited. There is no long term outlook for companies any more, and MS' long term strategy I think, is getting stronger. The cutting of the 18k employees is just showing they are narrowing their focus and really concentrating on the areas they think will be big; cloud, and mobile.

And as somebody in the cloud space myself (for work), I look at Azure with great interest because of their investment into it. We are a huge Microsoft customer already, and we can leverage that size and contract for our benefit with Azure and licensing; Amazon can't beat them on that, and if I get the enterprise tools I want... it's a no brainer. AWS has a lot of features, but the vast majority of them aren't useful at this point for our needs... we need pure infrastructure, autoscaling, and database services -- all of which are available through Azure, and all of which are available for a lower cost.

Who would still want to work there?

[Squidlips]

There is sure to be a Dead Sea effect and MS's long-term prospects cannot be great if they have lost / will lose their best people