As I’m sure you know by now, the calendars of big companies don’t line up with the regular people calendars, since we’re dealing with fiscal years. Microsoft recently ended the first fiscal quarter of 2018 and the financial results are in, with good news coming from the Surface area.
Overall revenue jumped 12%, compared to the same period from a year ago, reaching $24.5 billion. The net revenue is $6.6 billion, which is a 16% increase from the same time last year. These numbers beat analyst expectations and had the shares booming. The biggest cash makers are the Productivity and Cloud units, growing 28% and 14% respectively. The Surface area grew 12% and the Surface laptops sold quite well, although we don’t have exact numbers.
The latest Surface Pro and Surface Laptop are said to have been moving fine, particularly in the Back to School time frame. This was the first full quarter of availability for both products. In the meantime phone revenue dropped to basically zero, but the Surface revenue went to 0.1 billion. Xbox Live had 53 million monthly active users, a 6 million growth from last year.
A future bump in revenue will be registered as soon as Costco moves to using the Azure platform, offering Microsoft another big revenue stream. Windows OEM Pro revenue also grew 7% and the non Pro one was down 1%. Office 365 is up 32% in profits, while overall commercial Office was up a total of 10%.
