By Hannes Breustedt and Valerie Hamilton, dpa, Hamburg, Germany
Microsoft posted $4.7 billion in quarterly income Thursday as its Internet-based cloud service and storage business continued to boom.
Although the result was a decrease of 4 percent year-on-year, it beat analyst expectations and delighted investors, who drove shares in the tech giant up more than 5 percent to an all-time high of more than $60 in after-hours trading. Microsoft's stock price is up 20 percent in a year.
For chief executive Satya Nadella, who has staked the company's future on a transformation from the personal computing monolith of old to a modern cloud services provider, the results show his strategy is working.
Revenue from the company's cloud computing division grew by 8 percent to $6.4 billion in the quarter that ended Sept. 30, driven by explosive growth in the cloud computing platform Azure, with quarterly revenue was up 116 percent.
Nadella vaunted Microsoft's role leading "a profound digital transformation for customers, infusing intelligence across all of our platforms and experiences."
Microsoft's subscription-based Office software products also showed revenue growth of 6 percent to $6.7 billion.
The successes of Microsoft's new business served to underscore the shortfalls of the old.
PC sales, once the mainstay not only of the company but the industry, contracted a further 2 percent to $9.3 billion .
Revenue from Microsoft's largely abandoned mobile phone division fell 72 percent, while sales for its game division focused on the Xbox games console declined 5 percent.
©2016 Deutsche Presse-Agentur GmbH (Hamburg, Germany) Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
