Yesterday was earnings day at Microsoft as they released their 4th quarter financial data and it was a good day! They revealed a revenue of over $16 billion which was 22% higher than the same period last year.
“This quarter’s record revenue reflects the breadth of our offerings and our continued product momentum,” said Peter Klein, chief financial officer. “The revenue growth, combined with our ongoing cost discipline, helped us achieve another quarter of margin expansion.”
Product momentum continued during the quarter with the successful launch of Office 2010 and strong performance from existing products including Windows 7, which has sold more than 175 million licenses to date, Windows Server, Xbox, and Bing, which achieved its 13th consecutive month of share gain.
“We saw strong sales execution across all of our businesses, particularly in the enterprise with Windows 7 and Office 2010,” said Kevin Turner, chief operating officer. “Our transition to cloud services is well underway with offerings like Windows Azure and our Business Productivity Online Services, and we look forward to continuing our product momentum this fall with the upcoming launches of Windows Phone 7 and Xbox Kinect.”
Windows 7 and the Microsoft Office 2010 are big parts of that revenue increase along with the Xbox division which also had record earnings.
Did you catch that number in the above quote about the number of Windows 7 licenses that have been sold?
175 million and it has only been a little more than a year since RTM of Windows 7 was announced and only 9 months since general availability of the popular operating system.
According to Brandon LeBlanc on the Windows Blog – Windows 7 Momentum Continues: 175 Million Licenses Sold – Windows 7 is running on 16% of all PC’s worldwide and they are still selling 7 copies of Windows 7 every 7 seconds.
It’s exciting to see this kind of response from customers who have helped make Windows 7 the fastest selling operating system in history. We are also seeing some strong momentum with businesses for Windows 7. The PC “refresh cycle” for businesses has accelerated and we recorded the second straight quarter of double digital business license growth.
Brandon also mentions that this growth at Microsoft reflects growth across the tech industry in general:
Last week we highlighted a recent IDC press release that illustrated the growth of the global PC market – more than 22.4% year-over-year for the second quarter of 2010. Intel reported its best quarter ever with second quarter revenue up 34% year-over-year. And AMD reported a whopping 40% growth year-over-year in its earnings release, due to record sales of their chips for notebook computers.
