Riding on the success of Azure, Microsoft reported strong Q4 2021 earnings, posting revenues of USD46.2 billion, with a net income of USD16.5 billion and earnings per share of USD2.17.
The numbers beat street expectations, which were around USD44.1 billion and earnings per share of USD1.90. The company’s revenues grew by 21% compared to the year-ago quarter, while its net income expanded by 47% over the same time frame.
Azure, Microsoft’s cloud computing platform, posted 51% revenue growth in the quarter compared to Q4 2020. This represents the company’s best Azure growth result since its fiscal Q3 2020 quarter, or the first calendar quarter of last year.
“We are innovating across the technology stack to help organisations drive new levels of tech intensity across their business,” said Satya Nadella, chairman and chief executive officer.
“Our results show that when we execute well and meet customers’ needs in differentiated ways in large and growing markets, we generate growth, as we’ve seen in our commercial cloud – and in new franchises we’ve built, including gaming, security, and LinkedIn, all of which surpassed $10 billion in annual revenue over the past three years.
Amy Hood, executive vice president and chief financial officer of Microsoft, added: “As we closed out the fiscal year, our sales teams and partners delivered a strong quarter with over 20% top and bottom-line growth, highlighted by commercial bookings growth of 30% year over year. Our commercial cloud revenue grew 36% year over year to $19.5 billion.”
Among some of the highlights for Microsoft were: 46% increase in LinkedIn revenue (up 42% in constant currency) driven by Marketing Solutions growth of 97% (up 91% in constant currency); Microsoft 365 Consumer subscribers increasing to 51.9 million (revenue up 18%) and Dynamics 365 revenue growing 49% (up 42%).
Revenue in Intelligent Cloud was $17.4 billion and increased 30% (up 26% in constant currency). This included server products and cloud services revenue increase of 34%, driven by Azure’s 51% growth. Revenue in Personal Computing was $14.1 billion and increased 9%.
