Microsoft was worth a trillion dollars for a moment thanks to the cloud

Microsoft was yesterday, for a moment, the third company ever to see its market capitalization exceed trillion dollars. The company’s value increased after it announced its third fiscal quarter figures, and exceeded those expectations.

The company reported a profit for certain costs as share compensation of $1.14 per share, reports Silicon Angle. This is well above the expectation of a dollar per share from analysts. Turnover amounted to 30.6 billion dollars, 14 percent more than a year earlier and well above the expectation of 29.84 billion dollars. Net income rose by 19 percent to 8.8 billion dollars.

Microsoft also reported that its gross profit margin – the percentage of turnover remaining after the cost of its products and services sold – was 66.7 percent, compared to 65.4 percent a year earlier.

Cloud

Employees of the company said that the company’s Commercial Cloud continues to grow. This includes services such as Office 365, the Azure cloud and a little turnover from LinkedIn and Dynamics. The Commercial Cloud division had a turnover of $9.6 billion, which is 41 percent more than a year ago. Figures from Azure are not reported separately, but Microsoft did say that public cloud service revenue increased by 73 percent.

Office 365 is also reaping the benefits of companies moving to the cloud, according to the figures. The commercial sales of Office 365 – which contains products such as Excel and Word – grew by 30 percent, according to Microsoft. Turnover from LinkedIn increased by 27 percent.

Operating system Windows also had a good quarter, according to the figures. Operating system revenue is bundled in the company’s More Personal Computing division, along with Xbox and gaming, search ads and Surface sales. The division contributed $10.7 billion to the company’s revenue.

Expectations

Finally, Microsoft says it expects sales for the fourth quarter to be between 32.2 billion U.S. dollars and 32.9 billion U.S. dollars. That’s roughly in line with Wall Street’s expectation of $32.6 billion.