Category: Financials

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Microsoft Financial Results: Q3 FY23


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Microsoft announced their Q3 FY23 (Jan – Mar 23) results recently – let’s take a look at the numbers.

Overall revenue for the quarter was $52.9 billion – an increase of 7% while net income was up 9% to $18.3 billion. The latter something of a turnaround from the 12% decrease the previous quarter.

Productivity & Business Processes

Revenue = $17.5 billion…up 11%

  • Office 365 Commercial up 14%
  • LinkedIn up 8%
  • Dynamics up 25%

A little higher than Q2 but still lower than we’ve been seeing for the last couple of years.

Intelligent Cloud

Revenue = $22.1 billion…up 16%

Azure growth was 27% again, a decent increase but continuing the ongoing shrinking of the percentage increase each quarter.

Earnings Call

Satya Nadella stated that Microsoft continue to focus on 3 priorities:

  • Helping customers to get the most value out of their digital spend
  • Investing in AI to increase their Total Addressable Market (TAM) and be the leader
  • Aligning their cost structure with their revenue growth

We are now in the era of ChatGPT and AI – an area where Microsoft are expected to do very well in the coming months and years – and Nadella stated in the earnings call that they have over 2,500 Open AI Azure customers which is a 10x quarter on quarter increase. He also mentioned that ChatGPT runs on top of Microsoft’s CosmosDB.

Further updates include:

  • Azure Arc is up to 15,000+ customers which is 150% up year on year (YoY).
  • Power Platform is up to 33 million Monthly Active Users (MAU) – almost 50% up YoY.
  • Teams has broken the 300 million MAU mark.
  • Almost 60% of Enterprise customers are buying Teams Phone, Teams Rooms, and/or Teams Premium.
  • Almost 600,000 customers have deployed at least 4 Microsoft security workloads – a 35% YoY increase.
  • Amy Hood stated that, at the end of April 23, total headcount was 9% more than a year prior.

Satya mentioned Copilot several times and, in response to an analyst question, stated that:

“We do plan to monetize a separate set of meters across all of the tech stack, whether they’re consumption meters or per-user subscriptions. The copilot that’s priced, and it is there, is GitHub Copilot. That’s a good example of incrementally how we monetize the price lists out there, and others are to be priced, because we are in preview mode. But you can expect us to do what we’ve done with GitHub Copilot pretty much across the board”

Satya Nadella, Q3 FY23 earnings call

and that gives a good idea of what Copilot licensing may look like. I think my expectation of add-ons to E3 and E5 is pretty accurate.

While Microsoft’s revenue and profits are looking great, and they’re excited about all the growth ahead of them, the shine is dimmed somewhat by 2 things: the memory of the layoffs of circa 10,000 staff in January and the recent news that there are to be no pay raises across Microsoft. Give the increases in cost of living, energy, and inflation – wages staying flat can be seen as a pay cut in many ways.

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Microsoft Financial Results: Q1 FY23


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Let’s take a look at Microsoft’s financial results for the first quarter of FY23.

  • Overall revenue was $50.1 billion, an increase of 11%.
  • Operating income was $21.5 billion, up 6%…
  • but Net income was down 14% to $17.6 billion
  • Operating expenses were up 15% to $13.2 billion.

Looking at the individual divisions we see:

Productivity & Business Processes

Overall revenue up 9% to $16.5 billion and within that:

  • Office 365 Commercial revenue up 11%
  • LinkedIn revenue up 17%
  • Dynamics 365 revenue up 24%

Intelligent Cloud

Overall revenue was up 20% to $20.3 billion and within that:

  • Azure growth of 35%

Still a good increase but noticeably slowing down from previous quarters. Microsoft note that cloud margins are down primarily due to increased energy bills.

More Personal Computing

Overall revenue decreased slightly to $13.3 billion and within that:

  • Windows OEM revenue decreased 15%
  • Devices revenue increased 2%

Earnings Call

  • Satya Nadella was quick to point out the hybrid/multi-vendor approaches possible with Azure – talking about SAP & Oracle in the first couple of paragraphs.
  • PowerApps has almost 15 million monthly active users (MAU), a 50% year on year increase, and Power Automate has reached 7 million MAU.
  • Nadella also talked about Teams and how chat has overtaken email as where the average user spends their time. He also said:

“Teams is becoming a ubiquitous platform for business process.”

and shared that the number of enterprise users running 3rd party/custom apps has increased 60% year over year.

  • Microsoft Viva already has 20 million MAU – just the start of things for this line-up I’m sure.
  • Amy Hood spoke about strong E5 momentum being driven by security, compliance, and voice products and an increase in Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) too.
  • Nadella also stated:

“we are going to optimize for long-term customer loyalty by proactively helping them optimize [Azure] spend“

This follows on from what he said last quarter (and also matches what AWS recently said) that helping customers waste less will ultimately help them spend more.

Further Reading

See all the info, slides, and transcripts here.

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Microsoft Financial Results: Q3 FY22


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Microsoft’s financial results for Q3 FY22 (Jan – Mar 22) are in and, once again, they’re showing strong growth in all their key focus areas. They also listed several big name customers that they’re working with including:

  • Bridgestone
  • Lufthansa
  • Fujitsu
  • Woolworths
  • Cracker Barrel
  • Heineken

and called out Boeing, Heinz, and Westpac among customers making “strategic” Azure commitments.

Satya Nadella always hits us with a good quote during the earnings call and this quarter’s was:

“The last two years have proven that every organization needs a digital fabric that connects the entire organization”

Let’s take a look at some of the numbers:

Overall

Revenue = $49.4 billion – up 18%

Operating income = $20.4 billion – up 19%

Really strong top line numbers as always – remember, this is for just 3 months!

Productivity & Business Processes

Revenue = $15.8 billion – up 17%

  • Office 365 Commercial up 17%
  • Dynamics 365 up 35%
  • LinkedIn up 35%

Microsoft saw growth in SMB and frontline SKUs as well as increase in Revenue Per User – a key SaaS metric.

Office on-prem revenue was down 28%, continuing the downwards trend that we’ve been seeing for a couple of years now. It was noted as well that the end of Open Licensing has caused a drop in transactional license sales during the last quarter.

Intelligent Cloud

Revenue = $19.1 billion – up 26%

  • Azure (and other cloud services) up 46%
  • Server products up 5%

Another strong showing from Azure…with the number of $100 million Azure deals more than doubling over the previous year.

The server products increase includes Window Server & SQL Server in hybrid use cases (as well as Nuance) and again Microsoft mentioned the impact of Open Licensing’s end.

What else did we learn?

  • Satya Nadella once again called out the performance of Cosmos DB, with 100%+ YoY growth for 3 quarters in a row.
  • Power Platform, as a family, was up 72% year on year.
  • Microsoft Viva has over 10 million monthly active users.

Overall this is another great performance from Microsoft, giving them good momentum as they move into their Q4 (April – June) which is always a busy time of year. It will be interesting to see the full FY results in July for sure!

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Microsoft financial results: Q2 FY22


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Microsoft’s financial results are, once again, fantastic. For Q2 FY22 (Oct – Dec 21) their headline results are:

  • Revenue = $51.7 billion, an increase of 20%
  • Operating Income = $22.2 billion, an increase of 24%
  • Net Income = $18.8 billion, an increase of 21%

That’s over $51 billion in 3 months – a single quarter bigger than recent annual revenues for companies like Oracle, Nike, and Coca Cola.

Looking at the separate business units we see the following…

Productivity & Business Processes

  • Revenue = $15.9 billion, up 19%
  • Office 365 Commercial up 19%
    • “Continued momentum” for E5
  • LinkedIn up 37%
  • Dynamics 365 up 45%
  • Power Apps up 161%
  • Office Commercial (i.e on-premises) down 17%

Intelligent Cloud

  • Revenue = $18.3 billion
  • Azure up 46%
    • “Significant growth” in long-term contracts (again)
  • Enterprise Mobility up to 209 million+ seats

Yet more strong double digit growth across all these product divisions, as we’ve seen so many times before over the last few years. Although the growth is still very strong with Azure, it’s perhaps worth noting that the % increase is dropping slightly over time…from 50 in Q1 to now 46…although this makes sense – as the base grows, maintaining the same % increase becomes more difficult.

We also saw that the security business surpassed $15 billion in revenue, up almost 45% YoY.

“Digital technology is the most malleable resource at the world’s disposal to overcome constraints and reimagine everyday work and life.”

Earnings Call

There is always plenty of great info in the earnings call and this quarter was no different.

  • Azure Arc has tripled its user base YoY as organisations expand hybrid environments.
  • New Azure customers include:
    • CVS Health
    • Johnson & Johnson Medical Devices
    • Kyndryl
    • Wells Fargo
  • Cosmos DB transactions increased 100% YoY
  • Industry Clouds are driving “significant usage” across Microsoft Cloud
  • Teams has 270 million+ monthly active users
  • Microsoft Viva has over 1,000 paying customers already
  • Microsoft Sentinel has over 15,000 customers – a 70% increase YoY

Satya Nadella also discussed “Dynamics 365 Connected Spaces” (currently in preview) which is focused on automating and managing physical processes. This is part of their “Metaverse” play for business.

Note that many of the new “exotic” products are being name checked here:

  • Azure Arc
  • Cosmos DB
  • Industry Clouds
  • Power Apps
  • Microsoft Sentinel

This really helps to highlight Microsoft’s future plans and the successful growth they’re seeing there already. It also seems that there’s plenty of room for growth over the next few years so it doesn’t seem that Microsoft’s growth will be slowing any time soon.

Further Reading

Microsoft Earnings Press Release & documents

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Microsoft Financial Results FY21


$168.1 billion.

That was Microsoft’s revenue for FY21, which ended June 30, 2021, and it is a pretty staggering number! In fact, it’s about 40% bigger than the revenues of Oracle, SAP, and IBM combined!

Equally impressive was their Operating Income number of $69.9 billion but let’s dive a bit deeper and look at the numbers for Q4 FY21 (April – June 2021).

Q4 FY21

Overall for the final quarter, Microsoft saw:

  • Revenue = $46.2 billion – up 21%
  • Operating Income = $19.2 billion – up 42%

(As a comparison – Microsoft’s Q4 revenue was bigger than the individual total year revenue for both Oracle and SAP!)

Productivity & Business Processes

This division had revenue of $14.7 billion, an increase of 25% and within that:

  • Office 365 Commercial increased 25%
  • LinkedIn increased 46%
  • Dynamics 365 increased 49%

Intelligent Cloud

Here Microsoft saw revenue of $17.4 billion, a 30% increase, which was mainly driven by a 51% increase in Azure revenue.

More Personal Computing

This section saw a 9% increase to $14.1 billion with Windows Commercial products rising by 20%; however – Surface revenue dropped 20%…likely impacted by the ongoing chip shortage.

Other areas

The investor calls and information can give great insights beyond simply revenue figures, some of these tidbits include:

  • Another increase in long term Azure deals
  • Office 365 E5 comprises 8% of the total commercial installed base
  • Almost 250 million monthly active users on Teams
  • Almost 80 million monthly active Teams phone users
  • Over 1 billion Teams calls in a single month
  • Almost 600,000 orgs using Microsoft security products – with a 70% increase in SMB

Microsoft continue to grow and Satya Nadella seems confident they will be able to keep this up going forward. It certainly feels that there is a lot of expansion space available for Microsoft across several product areas – both winning business from rivals but, probably more so, creating brand new sectors in the cloud and across business applications too.

Further Reading

Microsoft Investor Info

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Microsoft Financial Results: Q3 FY21


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Microsoft’s financial results for Q3 FY21 (Jan – Mar 21) are in and, as usual, they’re pretty impressive.

  • Revenue = $41.7 billion – up 19%
  • Operating income = $17 billion – up 31%

Looking at the different product divisions we can see:

Productivity & Business Processes

Revenue = $13.6 billion – up 15%

Office 365 Commercial was up 22%, LinkedIn increased 25%, and Dynamics 365 was up 45%.

Microsoft Teams is up to 145 million daily active users, almost doubling YoY and Office 365 Commercial has nearly 300 million paid seats. Office Commercial products (on-premises Office) was down 25% – continuing its downwards trend as organisations continue to move to the cloud.

Satya Nadella revealed that Power Platform now has almost 16 million monthly active users, an increase of 97%, and revenue has increased by 84%. Amy Hood (CFO) called out Power Apps and Dynamics 365 Finance & Operations as strong performers.

Intelligent Cloud

Revenue = $15.1 billion – up 23%

Azure growth was 50% yet again, with Amy Hood highlighting an increase in the number of large, long-term Azure contracts.

On-premises server products grew 3%, although that seems to largely be due to year on year currency fluctuations, and the EMS install base grew again, now sitting at 174 million seats.

SQL Server on Azure VMs grew 129% YoY alongside Cosmos DB growth too.

More Personal Computing

Revenue = $13 billion – up 19%

Again there was a big difference in Windows OEM as Pro revenue declined 2% but non-Pro grew 44%.

See the Microsoft details here.

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Oracle Financial Results – Q3 FY21


The top numbers for Oracle’s Q3 FY21 are:

  • Revenue up 3% to $10.1 billion
  • Operating Income up 10% to $3.9 billion

Within that, the landscape for specific product areas is:

  • Cloud services & license support up 5% to $7.3 billion
  • Cloud license and on-premises licenses up 4% to $1.3 billion
  • Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) consumption up 123%

Oracle also touted double digit growth in both their Fusion (30%) and NetSuite (24%) Cloud ERP offerings.

Safra Catz, Oracle CEO, said they have some “very large users” coming to OCI soon that will need “significant amounts of capacity” and so Oracle are investing heavily to ensure they can handle all the new consumption.

She also called out that Java on-premises is doing “very well” as companies “continue to invest” in Java – it looks like the licensing changes of recent years are starting to pay off for Oracle.

Oracle predicts its own future

Ellison states that future success for Oracle lies in two areas:

  • ERP
  • Autonomous products

ERP

It’s clear that Larry Ellison is bullish on Oracle’s ERP offering – “our product is so much better than anyone else’s product in the cloud” – and he said that he expects Oracle will take over 50% of SAP’s customers plus those from other ERP companies too.

Autonomous Database

For me, pretty much the only person I’ve seen mention Oracle’s Autonomous Database is Larry Ellison, but he sure does like to mention it! Just as he’s been talking up ERP, he’s been doing the same for Autonomous Database:

“we expect it really to explode next year…I really do mean very, very rapid growth. I’m not really ready to disclose … why I think it’s going to suddenly spike but we expect very, very rapid database growth next year”

He sees autonomous products as a driver for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure too – both autonomous database and they also have an autonomous Linux offering too. He sees that removing human error and access as much as possible makes their cloud offering more cost effective and more secure than the other public cloud offerings.

Oracle are really pushing their OCI offering and, if they’re to be believed, are making a strong push for that #3 spot in public cloud providers, behind Amazon & Microsoft.

Further Reading

Call Transcript

Oracle Press Release

Oracle Investor Relations

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Microsoft financial results: Q2 FY21


Microsoft have, once again, had a stellar quarter (Oct-Dec 20) with overall results of:

  • Revenue up 17% to $43.1 billion
  • Operating income up 29% to $17.9 billion

Looking deeper into specific product categories and areas we can see:

Productivity and Business Processes

Revenue was up 13% to $13.4 billion which included:

  • Office 365 Commercial up 21%
  • Dynamics 365 up 39%
  • LinkedIn up 23%

Intelligent Cloud

Revenue was up 23% to $14.6 billion and Azure was revenue growth of 50%

More Personal Computing

The “other” parts of Microsoft’s business all saw success to with revenue up 14% to $15.1 billion. This included:

  • Windows Commercial up 10%
  • Xbox up 40%
  • Surface up 3%

Microsoft’s results are very consistent and are outperforming pretty much every comparable competitor you can think of…Oracle, SAP, and IBM are very far away from numbers like these! Amazon are still seeing great success with AWS – currently rising around 28% – but that is a greatly limited portfolio when compared to that under Satya Nadella’s control.

There are several areas of Microsoft’s product line-up which are at the very start of their evolution and will grow and continue these results for the foreseeable future.

See the full info from Microsoft here.

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Microsoft Financial Results: Q1 FY21


Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

As I think most of us expected, Microsoft’s strong financial results continued in Q1 FY21.

Headline figures

In July – September 2020, Microsoft saw:

  • Revenue up 12% to $37.2 billion
  • Operating Income up 25% to $15.9 billion
  • Net Income up 30% to $13.9 billion
  • Operating Expenses grew by 10% (primarily driven by investments in Azure)

This is a fantastic performance as Microsoft – unlike many of their rivals – continue to grow and thrive during the COVID-19 pandemic. While IBM, Oracle, and SAP are all reporting lacklustre numbers – Microsoft are doing very well. This is mainly due to Microsoft’s wide and varied portfolio – if you don’t want one thing, there are plenty of others they can sell you – but also due to the relevance of their product line-up.

Not only are Microsoft 365 and Azure hugely relevant right now, so are products like the Power Platform and Dynamics 365 as they enable new ways of working and digital transformation. This is a strength many of their competitors don’t have – if you don’t want to buy a big database or an ERP system, that dramatically reduces the options for Oracle & SAP for example.

Product Highlights

  • Office 365 commercial revenue was up 21%
  • Dynamics 365 again grew by 38%
  • Azure saw another quarter of 48% growth
  • LinkedIn was up 16%
  • Surface revenue rose 37%
  • Enterprise Mobility & Security install base has grown to 152 million+ seats

On the flip side – Office Commercial was down 30% showing the move away from on-premises perpetual to cloud-based subscriptions continues apace.

Microsoft also called out “continued weakness” in transactional licensing as they saw a 1% drop in “server products” revenue. To be honest, I’m surprised it isn’t a bigger drop than that…

Another drop in Windows Pro OEM sales (22%) while Windows non-Pro OEM grew by 31%. This will partly be due to organisations de-prioritising laptop refreshes right now but also, I suspect, by users working from home buying themselves new “work” devices. That latter aspect opens up some licensing issues – as volume licensing Windows licenses generally can’t be applied to Windows Home licenses.

Microsoft are in a very strong position and it’s further proof that Satya Nadella has overseen one of the greatest corporate turnarounds for a long time!

Further Reading

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/Investor/earnings/FY-2021-Q1/press-release-webcast

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