(San Francisco) Microsoft saw its growth decelerate and its profits shrink in the last quarter of 2022, but the American computer giant still reassured the market on Tuesday with its performance in the cloud despite the unfavorable economic context.
From October to December, the Redmond group (north-west) achieved a turnover of 52.7 billion dollars, or + 2% over one year, while it is used to double-digit growth .
Its net profit stood at 16.4 billion, down 12% year on year, according to its results release.
The company announced last week the dismissal by the end of March of almost 5% of its workforce, or around 10,000 employees, to cope with economic uncertainty and changing priorities of its customers.
She also indicated on Monday that she was going to invest “several billion dollars” to expand her partnership with the specialist in artificial intelligence (AI) OpenAI, creator in particular of the conversational robot ChatGPT, which arouses enthusiasm and dread even at the giant Google. .
Microsoft will “transform the most advanced AI models into a new computing platform”, promised boss Satya Nadella, quoted in the press release.
In the meantime, the group’s quarterly results were eagerly awaited by the market, to measure the evolution of demand for remote computing, or cloud.
Its “intelligent cloud” activity, which brings together its servers and data analysis services, brought in $ 21.5 billion in the second quarter of its staggered fiscal year (+ 18% year on year).
Growth in its remote computing platform, Azure, which was 31% lighter than usual, drove the business.
On Wall Street, Microsoft took about 4% in electronic trading after the close of trading.
“Some cloud contracts could be scaled back as companies reevaluate their data center plans” because of budget challenges, notes Dan Ives of Wedbush.
But according to this analyst, the appetite of the government and the army for these infrastructures is undeniable, and many companies have not yet made their digital transition.
“We believe that the transition to the cloud [des entreprises et organisations] remains below 50% and therefore represents a massive opportunity for Microsoft” despite the poor economic situation, he specifies.