News

Microsoft Announces Positive Q4 Revenue Results of $46.2B

• By Kurt Mackie
• July 27, 2021

Microsoft on Tuesday reported $46.2 billion in total revenue during its fiscal-year 2021 Q4 period, up 21% from the same quarter last year.

Net income was $16.5 billion, up 47% compared with the last year's Q4 result.

The earnings-per-share Q4 result of $2.17 beat financial analyst expectations by about $0.25. Microsoft also claimed to have "returned $10.4 billion to shareholders" via repurchases and dividends during Q4, which is up 16% compared with last year's Q4 results.

Business Segments
Microsoft described quarterly revenue performance figures for some of its business segments as follows:

• Windows commercial products and services revenue increased 20%, but Windows OEM revenue decreased 3% due to "supply-chain constraints" on PC demand.
• Microsoft Surface PC device revenue decreased 20%, again attributed to supply-chain constraints.
• Xbox service and content revenue dipped 4%.
• Office commercial products and services revenue increased 20%.
• Office consumer products and services revenue increased 18%.
• Dynamics 365 products revenue increased 33%.
• LinkedIn service revenue increased 18% (CEO Satya Nadella said it surpassed $10 billion for the first time in this fiscal year).

Cloud Revenues
All eyes in the financial world tend to be turned toward Microsoft's cloud services revenue and its growth prospects. Microsoft reported "Intelligent Cloud" revenue of $17.4 billion for the quarter, up 30% versus the last Q4 result.

Nadella said during the earnings call that "our commercial cloud surpassed $69 billion in annual revenue, up 34 percent."

Microsoft Azure revenue grew 51% during Q4, which Microsoft attributed to "growth in our consumption-based services."

Those largely positive cloud numbers still resulted in an after-hours Microsoft stock dip. The dip was attributed to Xbox results and "soft" Azure revenues, according to a Seeking Alpha report. Azure's annual revenue figures, while typically on the positive side, have been declining since fiscal-year 2016, per an Investopedia report.

Nadella Highlights
Nadella offered various observations about Microsoft's business during the earnings call. He said that "in the past three years alone, gaming, security and now LinkedIn have all surpassed $10 billion in annual revenue" for Microsoft.

Other Nadella observations included:

• New datacenter regions added in 15 countries over the past year.
• Microsoft's hybrid offerings used by 75% of Fortune 500 companies.
• GitHub used by 72% of Fortune 50 to build and ship software.
• Power Apps use has "more than doubled year over year."
• Dynamics 365 revenue is "up 49% year over year."
• LinkedIn has more than 774 million members and ad revenue surpassed $1 billion this quarter.
• Microsoft Teams has "nearly 250 million monthly active users."
• Windows 11 has the most downloads than any other preview release under the Windows Insider Program.

Microsoft's Q4 period ended on June 30, 2021. Also reported were full fiscal-year results, with similar positive results.