Microsoft Crushes Q2 Earnings

After reporting its quarterly earnings earlier this week, it should be clear for all to see that Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT, Rated “B+”) was a huge winner in the pandemic.

Numbers for Q2 were spectacular, yet again. The surprise — for anyone who wasn’t paying attention, that is — was how little the business is being impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic.

According to a corporate press release, fourth-quarter revenues surged to $38 billion, a 13% increase year-over-year. Sales from its Azure cloud business ramped up 47%. Overall, the company reported $11.2 billion in profits.

Source: Microsoft

 

It turns out working from home is a boon for companies that provide IT infrastructure.

And this monster trend is only getting started.

The Redmond, Wash.-based software giant is in peak form because years ago managers decided to begin moving customers and its own infrastructure to the cloud. That meant all the heavy lifting, processing and storing of data was running in robust data centers all over the world. When most of the world shuttered due to COVID-19, Microsoft was ready.

Related Post: Microsoft Was Built for the COVID-19 Crisis

The results today show Microsoft is continuing to smash it out of the park.

The Productivity and Business Processes division generated $11.8 billion in sales during the quarter, up 6% from the same period last year. Given the macroeconomic state of the world, with plunging GDP and record unemployment, that’s an impressive development.

But the kicker is that digital transformation is only in the early innings.

Statista, an online analytics aggregator, finds that analysts project the total addressable market for digital transformation strategies to reach $1.9 trillion by 2022, up from $1.2 trillion in 2019.

And Microsoft is winning more than its fair share of that marketplace. Revenues at its Intelligence Cloud division increased to $13.4 billion, up 17% from a year ago. That division is also home to Azure.

Going forward, beyond the pandemic, the company is in a great position. Scale is an important competitive advantage in the brave new digital world. Enterprises want expertise and innovation, but they also want to be certain their technology partners have the wherewithal to get the big things done. Taking a shot with smaller companies is not on the table at this point. The risk is too great.

This undoubtedly plays into the strengths of Amazon.com (Nasdaq: AMZN, Rated “C+”)Alphabet (Nasdaq: GOOGL, Rated “B”) and Microsoft. And it’s an advantage that is not going to change any time soon.

Related Post: Follow Bill Gates to Big Opportunities

To be sure, all the big cloud infrastructure providers have performed well this year. Microsoft shares are up 34.3%. Even though the company now has a market capitalization in excess of nearly $1.6 trillion, the potential of its business is still not being reflected in the share price.

Think about this: Only a few months ago, the current scale of the work-from-home movement was unimaginable. On-site servers would have been overwhelmed by the demand.

Azure servers didn’t miss a beat. They kept pace with the transition. The infrastructure was built to take advantage of rapid changes in client business models. Now shareholders are beginning to see some of the fruits of Microsoft’s investment playout in corporate statements.

 

The digital transformation narrative, and the profitability it implies, is still in the early innings. And Microsoft is going to be one of the big Future Shock 2020 winners.

Best wishes,

Jon D. Markman

About the Editor

Jon D. Markman is winner of the prestigious Gerald Loeb Award for outstanding financial journalism and the Society of Professional Journalists' Sigma Delta Chi award. He was also on Los Angeles Times staffs that won Pulitzer Prizes for coverage of the 1992 L.A. riots and the 1994 Northridge earthquake. He invented Microsoft’s StockScouter, the world’s first online app for analyzing and picking stocks.

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