Microsoft’s Surface revenue up 32 percent alongside its booming cloud
Perhaps the biggest surprise from Microsoft’s third quarter earnings: Its Surface business is still going strong with nearly $1.1 billion in revenue. That’s up 32 percent from last year, when sales dipped to $831 million. By this time last year, the Surface Laptop and Pro hadn’t launched yet, which didn’t leave much fresh hardware for consumers to pick up. The company’s cloud business is still ballooning, unsurprisingly — it’s now up another 17 percent from last year. Overall, Microsoft reported revenue of $26.8 billion (up 16 percent), with a net income of $7.4 billion (a 35 percent increase).
Other quarterly highlights: revenue in its “More Personal Computing” division, which includes Surface and Xbox, is up 13 percent, while “Productivity and Business Processes,” where Office and LinkedIn live, has grown by 17 percent. Aside from Surface’s recovery, and a healthy 37 percent revenue boost for LinkedIn, there weren’t many surprises for Microsoft this quarter. It’s business as usual — it just so happens things are booming.
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