After The Bell, Microsoft Will Report Its Quarterly Earnings

(CTN News) – After regular trading Tuesday, Microsoft will report earnings for the third quarter of its fiscal year.

To keep an eye on, the following numbers are important:

• Analysts had expected the company to earn $2.23 per share, adjusted, according to Refinitiv.

• According to Refinitiv, the company’s revenue came in at $51.02 billion, which is in line with analyst expectations.

In terms of revenue, it is expected to grow at a rate of 3% over the previous quarter, which would mark the second straight quarter when revenue is growing below 10%. Prior to that, every quarter since 2017, the percentage expansion had been at least double digits in terms of percentage growth.

It is expected that Microsoft’s personal computing division, which includes the Windows operating system licenses sold to PC manufacturers as well as Xbox consoles and Surface devices, will perform weakest in the next quarter.

There was a 30% decline in PC shipments during the first quarter of this year, according to research firm Gartner.

A bright spot for Microsoft continues to be its Azure cloud business, but growth is slowing down in recent years. CNBC’s survey of analysts predicts that the company will grow 26.5% from the previous year, while StreetAccount predicts that it will grow 27.2% from the previous year.

As far as Azure business is concerned, Microsoft does not disclose the dollar value of its Azure business.

As a result of the adoption of Azure and other cloud services, Azure revenue grew by 31% during the fiscal second quarter, down from 35% the year before.

Another reason for investors to be excited about Azure is the fact that the company has aligned itself with ChatGPT creator OpenAI.

Microsoft announced in the third quarter that it was investing a new multi-billion dollar sum in OpenAI and that it would be able to leverage the company’s artificial intelligence models for a new version of its Bing search engine and enhancements to the Microsoft 365 productivity suite.

Over the course of the year, Microsoft shares have risen 17% over the past 12 months, while the S&P 500 index has gained less than 8%.

It is anticipated that there will be a conference call with executives starting at 5:30 p.m. Eastern Time in order to provide guidance to analysts on the results and to discuss them in detail.

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