Microsoft Corp., the world’s largest software maker, reported second-quarter profit that topped analysts’ estimates after Windows 7 spurred the first sales increase in a year.
Second-quarter net income rose 60 percent to $6.66 billion, or 74 cents a share, beating the 59-cent average estimate of analysts surveyed by Bloomberg. Revenue climbed 14 percent to $19 billion, the company said today in a statement.
Personal-computer buyers stepped up orders last quarter as the economy recovered and Microsoft released a new version of Windows. Sales of U.S. PCs running Windows rose about 50 percent over the holiday season, the company said earlier this month, citing data from NPD Group Inc. Microsoft is counting on Windows 7 to trigger a surge of upgrades by consumers and businesses.
“Microsoft is in a great position,” sent Brent Thill, an analyst at UBS AG in San Francisco, who recommends buying the shares. “They have one of the best product cycles in the last five years, maybe 10, and it spans across their three biggest divisions.”
Microsoft, based in Redmond, Washington, fell 51 cents to $29.16 at 4 p.m. New York time on the Nasdaq Stock Market. The stock climbed 19 percent last quarter, exceeding the 5.5 percent gain by the Standard and Poor’s 500 Index.
Today’s earnings report is the first under Chief Financial Officer Peter Klein, who was named to the post in November. Second-quarter sales included $1.71 billion in deferred revenue from previous quarters. Analysts projected total sales of $17.9 billion for the period, which ended Dec. 31. A year earlier, net income was $4.17 billion, or 47 cents a share, on sales of $16.6 billion.
No Forecast
Microsoft, which stopped giving earnings forecasts in January 2009, didn’t give a specific outlook for profit and sales. Microsoft reiterated an October prediction that it will spend as much as $26.5 billion on operating expenses this fiscal year.
PC shipments rose 15 percent worldwide last quarter, according to Framingham, Massachusetts-based IDC, which had predicted 11 percent growth. U.S. shipments were even more surprising. They jumped 24 percent, four times the rate that IDC had projected.
Microsoft’s Windows runs more than 90 percent of the world’s PCs. Many customers skipped the last version of the software, called Vista, raising speculation that buyers will upgrade this time around.
Microsoft’s Bing search engine, released in June, has increased its market share by 2.7 percentage points, according to research firm ComScore Inc. Microsoft had 10.7 percent of the U.S. search market in December, compared with 65.7 percent for Google Inc. and 17.3 percent for Yahoo! Inc., according to ComScore.
No comments:
Post a Comment