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Microsoft - a winner of the crisis (archive image)
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GERARD JULIEN / AFP
The world's largest software company Microsoft wins from the trend towards working from home.
The digitization and use of cloud services accelerated by the corona crisis caused sales to climb by twelve percent to 37.2 billion dollars in the past quarter.
This was announced by the US group after the stock market closed.
Profits rose to $ 13.9 billion - 30 percent more than the same period last year.
Since the outbreak of the pandemic, Microsoft has not only scored with its cloud solutions and the Teams program for cross-location work, but also with old blockbusters such as the Windows operating system, which is newly installed on laptops, and the XBox game console.
The career network LinkedIn, which is also part of Microsoft, increased its revenues by 16 percent.
After unsuccessful efforts to buy the TikTok short video app, Microsoft swallowed US game developer ZeniMax Media in September for $ 7.5 billion, which includes successful titles such as "Doom" and "Fallout".
Microsoft shares rise
Microsoft is benefiting from the fact that the Redmond company has been expanding its cloud business for many quarters and is now benefiting from the fact that more and more companies are foregoing expensive data centers of their own.
Instead, they prefer to use the services of cloud platforms, which provide them with storage space and applications on external servers.
With Azure, Microsoft has risen to number two in the market behind AWS from Amazon.
In the first fiscal quarter at the end of September, Azure went up 48 percent.
"The demand for our cloud offerings ensures a strong start to the fiscal year," said finance director Amy Hood.
According to her, Microsoft earned $ 15.2 billion through its cloud offerings alone, 31 percent more than in the same period last year.
On Thursday, Google and Amazon, among others, will publish their quarterly figures and give an insight into the past quarter.
On Wednesday the competitors - in contrast to Microsoft - have to take part in a hearing before a US Senate committee and answer questions about market power, among other things.
The Microsoft share rose after hours by one percent.
Sales and profits exceeded analysts' expectations.
This year the company has increased its market value by a third to $ 1.6 trillion.
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svv / Reuters