Microsoft Q3 2016: good Surface and cloud, Lumia sales dive

Microsoft announced financial results for its third fiscal quarter 2016, ended in late March. Quarter ended in surplus, despite a decline in sales and profit on an annual basis. The Redmond posted GAAP revenues of US $ 20.5 billion which generated a GAAP net income of 3.8 billion dollars (4.985 billion dollars in the same period last year. The articulated business activities Microsoft stand out the positive trends highlighted by sales of Surface devices and cloud services; on the other side the results of Lumia devices characterized by the recent massive drop in sales.

The turnover generated by the Surface devices, driven in the current quarter from the sale of Surface and Surface Pro 4 Book, totaled $ 1.1 billion ($ 713 million in Q3 2016); Microsoft, however, does not provide the exact data in terms of units and type of models sold. One of the most critical voices of the new interim financial statements consists of the Lumia devices: only 2.3 million units were sold in the current quarter, a figure that translates into a 73% drop in sales (8.6 million units in Q3 1016) and reduced turnover by 46% compared to the same period last year.

A result which, unfortunately, not surprising given that the company has further reduced the Lumia business, selling only a new medium to low-end model - Lumia 650 - in the first three months of the year. Xbox does better, at least from the perspective of Xbox Live subscribers increased by 26% on an annual basis: the service can now count 46 million users, while the number of consoles sold was not disclosed.

The turnover of the Windows OEM licenses, as always linked to the PC market dynamics, recorded a further contraction of 2% year on year, lower than the 7% reported in the previous quarter. A signal of the fact that, albeit still difficult, the situation shows slight signs of improvement of certain, like Microsoft states, to request a higher premium devices. Cloud office and continue to represent major budget items. Office and Office 365 (both commercial versions, is that intended final user) registered a slight increase in turnover (+ 1%) to $ 6.5 billion. The Office 365 users are further increased to a total of 22.2 million (+1.6 million compared to the previous quarter).

As for the sector "Intelligent Cloud", which includes products and services servers (including Windows Server and Azure), there was a growth of 3% turnover with 6.1 billion dollars. Stands out, above all, the Azure performance with increased revenues by 120% and use the Azure and SQL Azure more than doubled year on year database. Microsoft pointed out, moreover, that in the quarter in question, the run-rate  commercial cloud has exceeded 10 billion dollars.