Microsoft Q4 strong as commercial cloud revenue hits $6.9 billion
Microsoft handily topped fourth quarter expectations as its commercial cloud revenue was $6.9 billion, up 53 percent from a year ago.
Like recent quarters, Microsoft's results highlighted a company firing on all cylinders. The company reported fourth quarter net income of $8.9 billion, or $1.14 a share, on revenue of $30.1 billion, up 17 percent from a year ago. Non-GAAP earnings in the quarter were $1.13 a share.
Wall Street was looking for fourth quarter earnings of $1.08 a share on revenue of $29.2 billion.
CEO Satya Nadella said the company's investments in cloud and edge computing were paying off as Microsoft topped $100 billion in revenue for the year. Microsoft also recently acquired GitHub.
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Perhaps the most surprising thing about Microsoft's quarter is that it didn't call out its commercial cloud run rate, which is now more than $27 billion. Azure revenue was up 89 percent from a year ago in the fourth quarter.
Here's the commercial cloud look:
By unit, Microsoft's productivity and business processes division had fourth quarter revenue of $9.7 billion, up 13 percent from a year ago. Office commercial products and cloud services revenue was up 10 percent with consumer Office up 8 percent.
Microsoft ended the fourth quarter with 31.4 million Office 365 consumer subscribers. LinkedIn revenue was up 47 percent. And Dynamics products and services sales were up 11 percent.
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The intelligent cloud division delivered fourth quarter revenue of $9.6 billion, up 23 percent from a year ago, with more personal computing sales at $10.8 billion.
Surface revenue was up 25 percent from a year ago.
For fiscal 2018, Microsoft reported net income of $16.6 billion, or $2.13 a share, on revenue of $110.4 billion, up 14 percent. Microsoft spent $14.73 billion on research and development in fiscal 2018.