Microsoft Delivers A Big Quarter, But Online Operations Lose $696 Million

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Published
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Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) announced record fourth-quarter revenue of $16.04 billion for the quarter ended June 30, 2010, a 22% increase from the same period of the prior year. Operating income, net income and diluted earnings per share for the quarter were $5.93 billion, $4.52 billion and $0.51 per share, which represented increases of 49%, 48% and 50%, respectively, when compared with the prior year period.

Thomson Reuters has estimates of $0.46 EPS (vs. $0.36 a year ago) and $15.22 billion in revenues.While the core software businesses of the company delivered extremely strong results, non-core operations in games and online search and content did poorly.

Sales of Microsoft’s Windows division  were $4.5 billion with operating income of $3.1 billion. That compares to $3.2 billion and $1.9 billion in the same quarter last  year.

Microsoft’s servers and tools division had revenue of $4 billion and operating income of $1.5 billion. Those numbers during the same quarter last year were $3.5 billion and $1.2 billion, a sign that margins in the group are under some pressure.

The business divisions, Microsoft’s largest, had $5.3 billion and operating income of $3.2billion. In the same quarter last year, the numbers were $4.6 billion and $2.7 billion.

The company’s entertainment group, mostly sales of Xbox products, posted a loss of $172 million, slightly higher than last year. Revenue was $1.6 billion up from $1.3 billion. The company could not add the addition sales to any bottom line benefit

Microsoft’s online business, which has been bedeviled by losses for year, had red ink of $696 million compared with $585 million in the same period last year. Revenue was up modestly from $501 million to $565 million. The recovery of search revenue and display advertising was disappointing. The MSN property’s CPMs could have been hurt by a flood of low-priced display inventory from Facebook.

The total results were better than expectations, but their composition was no surprise at all.

Douglas A. McIntyre

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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