(San Francisco) Microsoft, which has just announced its plan to acquire Activision Blizzard studios (call of duty, candy Crush), exceeded market expectations in the last quarter of 2021 with strong performance in cloud and software.
Posted at 7:30 p.m.
The U.S. IT giant posted $51.7 billion in revenue and $18.8 billion in net profit in the second quarter of its lagged fiscal year, according to a statement on Tuesday – results that beat forecasts analyst averages.
The cloud, its engine, ran at full capacity from October to December: Azure, its remote computing platform, saw its revenues jump 46% in one year. They had already increased by half in the previous quarter.
In contrast, Xbox (content and services) recorded a weaker revenue growth of 10%.
The game console is the second most used in the world, behind Sony’s PlayStation, which held 64.5% of the market share worldwide in 2021, according to Statista.
But the American group seems determined to regain ground in video games and more mainstream technologies in general.
At the end of October, Microsoft announced the acquisition of Two Hat, a content moderation company, which was already involved in removing problematic content from Xbox.
Above all, the IT veteran, who already owns Minecraft, has planned to buy the publisher Activision Blizzard, known for its successful franchises, for nearly 69 billion dollars.
It would be the biggest M&A deal to ever happen in tech.
Microsoft would thus become the third largest group in the video game industry in terms of turnover, behind Chinese Tencent and Japanese Sony, maker of the PlayStation.
He thus hopes to integrate Activision titles into his Xbox Game Pass monthly subscription service, and, beyond that, to position himself as a key player in the construction of the metaverse, these parallel universes where human and augmented realities must merge. and virtual, according to the tech giants.
In the meantime, the Redmond company can count on its traditional activities.
During the past quarter, its Office office suite and associated data storage and processing services improved their sales by 14% on the business side and 15% on the personal side. And LinkedIn, its professional social network, grew by 37%.
Windows is doing well too, as the group released Windows 11 in late 2021.
Microsoft stock was down 4-5% in electronic trading after the close of trading as some optimistic investors hoped for even better results for the cloud.