14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft reached $1 trillion market valuation in after hours trading, after the company managed to beat analyst expectations for the third quarter of fiscal year 2019.
The stock jumped no less than 3 percent after Microsoft’s earnings report, reaching $130.50 and pushing the overall market cap to more than $1 trillion.
Microsoft thus becomes the second technology giant to be worth $1 trillion, after rival Apple reached the same milestone in 2017.
Amy Hood, executive vice president and chief financial officer of Microsoft, says several divisions managed to beat expectations with strong performance during the quarter.
Microsoft’s products performing better than anticipated
For example, the Productivity and Business Processes unit reached revenue of $10.2 billion thanks to an increase of 14 percent, and Microsoft says this is ahead of expectations mostly thanks to LinkedIn and the good performance in Japan.
Office consumer revenue also beat expectations, and so did the Intelligent Cloud division, which scored a revenue of $9.7 billion and 22 percent increase.
“Our sales teams and partners delivered strong results across each of our segments, once again resulting in double-digit top and bottom line growth. From a geographic perspective, most markets performed in line with our expectations, however, results in Japan were much stronger than we anticipated,” Hood explained.
CEO Satya Nadella says it’s the innovation the one that is generating growth, and uses Office as the living proof in this regard.
“All this innovation is driving growth: Office 365 commercial now has 180 million users. Our EMS install base reached 100 million. And the Outlook apps on iOS and Android surpassed more than 100 million users for the first time this quarter,” Nadella explained.
Microsoft now estimates that its fiscal fourth quarter revenue would be $32.2 billion to $32.9 billion, in line with analyst expectations.