Over the past several years, Microsoft has spent much money and effort pushing the transition from traditional software to its cloud computing services. And it seems this was a worthwhile jump, especially when you look at the tech giant’s quarterly earnings. For the last quarter of 2017, the cloud computing sector of Microsoft rose to $5.3 billion — an increase of 56%.
Even with such strong numbers, Microsoft comes in at the number two spot for cloud computing sales (behind Amazon). After chief executive Satya Nadella took over, the company increased cloud computing sales efforts and is seemingly going after Amazon with full force.
Cloud revenues weren’t the only areas in the company to increase.
The total revenue for quarter four of last year rose 12% to $28.92 billion. These increases were due to a combined effort, with most products—from Office apps to the Xbox—all recording growth.
Specifically, Office applications reported a revenue increase of 10% for the traditional CD version and saw an increase of over four million cloud application suite consumers.
Likewise, the gaming sector saw an 8% increase, largely due to the release of the Xbox One X console. Xbox profits help to contribute to total cloud computing sales due to the amount of content downloadable from the console itself.
Overall though, if you took the company’s quarterly report at face value, you’d see that Microsoft actually reported a net loss. This was in part due to changes to the tax law, which cost Microsoft $6.3 billion. With this tax change, Microsoft’s stock shares decreased to 82 cents per share (from 96 cents per share).