Microsoft on Thursday reported an increase in revenues in its fiscal third quarter, helped by a $1.4 billion contribution from its recently-acquired mobile phones business.
The U.S. company posted revenues of $21.73 billion in the three months to the end of March, up 6.5% on the year-ago quarter. Excluding the impact of a stronger U.S. dollar compared with foreign currencies, revenue would have grown by 9%, it said.
Net profit fell by almost 12% to $4.99 billion, but the firm’s numbers came in ahead of the expectations of many analysts, although expectations were modest.
The results include $190 million in integration and restructuring expenses, amounting to a negative impact of $0.01 per share, relating to the restructuring plan Microsoft announced in July and the integration of Nokia’s devices business.
"Customers continue to choose Microsoft to transform their business and as a result we saw incredible growth across our cloud services this quarter," said Satya Nadella, chief executive officer at Microsoft.
Microsoft said commercial cloud revenue grew 106%, driven by Office 365, Azure and Dynamics CRM Online, and is now on an annualized revenue run rate of $6.3 billion.
Revenue at Microsoft’s devices and consumer unit grew by 8% to $8.95 billion, helped by $1.4 billion in phone hardware revenue that did not appear in the year-ago quarter. Microsoft closed the acquisition of Nokia’s mobile phones business in April last year, during its fiscal Q4.
In the same segment, computing and gaming hardware revenue fell by 4% to $1.8 billion.
