By Tess Stynes
Microsoft Corp. said its revenue fell 5.1% in its latest
quarter, hurt by continued weak PC demand, and posted its biggest
quarterly loss ever on a hefty write-down and other items related
to the Nokia mobile-phone business acquired last year.
Shares fell 3.3% to $45.65 in recent after-hours trading.
For the period ended June 30, revenue decreased to $22.18
billion from $23.38 billion a year earlier. Excluding currency
impacts, revenue dropped 2%. Analysts polled by Thomson Reuters
expected revenue of $22.03 billion.
Per-share earnings, after stripping out the write-down and other
one-time items, also beat expectations.
Microsoft's Windows smartphones have a tiny share of the
smartphone market, which is dominated by market leader Apple Inc.'s
iPhone.
Earlier this month Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft said its was
writing down about 80% of the $9.4 billion deal for Nokia's handset
business and that it would cut more than 6% of its global
workforce--mostly in its mobile-phone operation--a year after an
earlier round of job cuts to the business.
Overall, Microsoft reported a loss of $3.2 billion, or 40 cents
a share, compared with a year-earlier profit of $4.61 billion, or
55 cents a share. Excluding the write-down, restructuring charges
and other items, per-share earnings rose to 62 cents from 56 cents.
Analysts expected per-share profit of 56 cents.
Sales of Office products to businesses fell 4% as negative
currency impacts masked underlying growth of 1% amid the transition
to Office 365 and lower transaction revenue linked to declining
business PC demand. Windows volume licensing revenue declined 8%,
or 4% excluding the impact of foreign-exchange rates.
In its consumer and device business, Windows OEM revenue
decreased 22%, also linked to PC market declines.
The sales declines were partly offset by growth in Microsoft's
commercial cloud business and sales of computing and gaming
hardware, including Xbox which increased 27%, and Surface, which
more than doubled.
Cloud software sold to businesses--primarily Office 365, the
Microsoft Dynamics CRM sales tool and the Azure cloud-computing
service--surged 88%, and excluding the impact of foreign-exchange
rates it soared 96%.
Investors likely will be interested in what Chief Executive
Satya Nadella's has to say on the conference call about the
strategy for turning Microsoft's mobile business around.
The latest version of Microsoft's operating system--Windows
10--is due to come out next week. However, analysts ahead of the
earnings report weren't expecting the updated software will do much
to boost weak sales trends for personal computers. Wall Street also
will be watching for any details on how the new Windows software
will affect Microsoft's financial performance.
Write to Tess Stynes at tess.stynes@wsj.com
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