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<p>Thanks in part to its colossal cloud business, <a href="https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/">Microsoft</a> earnings are drenching shareholders in dollars.</p>
<p>For the quarter ending March 31, 2018, the tech ringer from Redmond saw its revenue increase to $26.8 billion (up 16 percent) from $23.2 billion, with operating income up 23 percent to $8.3 billion, up from $6.7 billion.</p>
<p>Income was a whopping $7.4 billion (up from $5.5 billion) and diluted earnings per share were 95 cents versus analyst expectations of 85 cents per share, according to FactSet.</p>
<p>Despite the earnings beat, shares of the company stock fell as much as 1 percent in after-hours trading on the Nasdaq stock exchange.</p>
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<p>Floating much of <a href="https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/microsoft/" target="_blank">Microsoft&#8217;s </a> success for the quarter was the continued strength of the company&#8217;s cloud business, which chief executive Satya Nadella singled out in a statement.</p>
<p>&#8220;Our results this quarter reflect the trust people and organizations are placing in the Microsoft Cloud,&#8221; Nadella said. &#8220;We are innovating across key growth categories of infrastructure, AI, productivity and business applications.&#8221;</p>
<p>The company also returned $6.3 billion to shareholders in dividends and share repurchases in the third quarter 2018, an increase of 37 percent.</p>
<p>The company notched wins across the board. In addition to the growth of its cloud business &#8212; led by Azure (which grew 93 percent) &#8212; Microsoft also recorded strong growth from <a href="https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/linkedin/" target="_blank">LinkedIn, </a> which saw revenue increase 37 percent to $1.3 billion and hardware revenue from the Surface increasing 32 percent.</p>
<p>Even the move of Microsoft office into a hosted business seems to have stanched the flow of bleeding from the company&#8217;s former cash cow. The company counts 135 million business users on Office 365, and 30.6 million consumer subscriptions for the service.</p>
<p>The Surface numbers are notable because it&#8217;s perhaps the first indication that its hardware successes aren&#8217;t necessarily limited to the Xbox (insert Zune joke here).</p>
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<br><a href="https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/26/by-keeping-its-head-in-the-cloud-microsoft-makes-it-rain-on-shareholders/">Source link </a>