Microsoft beats Q1 estimates with $23.2B in revenue, $4.54B in income

Things are looking up at Microsoft.

Today the company reported $4.54 billion in net income, or 54 cents per share in earnings, and $23.2 billion in revenue for the first quarter of its new fiscal year, beating analysts’ expectations of 49 cents in earnings per share and $22.02 billion in revenue.

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That puts year-over-year revenue growth at 25.2 percent for the quarter.

And what a quarter it was for the tech giant, whose chief executive, Satya Nadella, not only announced a new vision for Microsoft to be “the productivity and platform company for the mobile-first and cloud-first world” but also signaled that the company would cut as many as 18,000 jobs.

It was Nadella’s second full quarter as chief executive. Last time around, revenue barely beat expectations.

Today’s earnings report shows progress in cloud revenue, for both dedicated Microsoft applications and the company’s Azure cloud infrastructure. Commercial cloud revenue was up 128 percent, the company said.

That puts it ahead of Microsoft applications that customers can run on servers, like SharePoint and Lync. Growth for that category was merely in the double digits, according to today’s statement.

One challenging area for Microsoft: the evolution of the popular Office software from being solely a desktop product to one based in the cloud. Revenue for Office commercial products and services increased by just 5 percent “as customers transition to Office 365,” the company said in its earnings statement.

Surface revenue for the quarter came in at $908 million. And Xbox console sales were up 102 percent, Microsoft said. Microsoft also said it sold 9.3 million Lumia smartphones in FQ1 2015.

More detail on that and other subjects should come in the earnings call, beginning at 2:30 Pacific.

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