Microsoft is making lots of money. Anything else notable in its first quarter financials?

Microsoft has released its statements for the first quarter in its financial year, ending 30th September. Here is the segment breakdown. Everything has moved in the right direction.

Quarter ending September 30th 2018 vs quarter ending September 30th 2017, $millions

Segment Revenue Change Operating income Change
Productivity and Business Processes 9771 +1533 3881 +875
Intelligent Cloud 8567 +1645 2931 +794
More Personal Computing 10746 +1368 3143 +578

The segments break down as:

Productivity and Business Processes: Office, Office 365, Dynamics 365 and on-premises Dynamics, LinkedIn

Intelligent Cloud: Server products, Azure cloud services

More Personal Computing: Consumer including Windows, Xbox; Bing search; Surface hardware

Any points of interest? In his earnings call statement, CEO Satya Nadella talked Teams, the Office 365 conferencing and collaboration solution:

“Teams is now the hub for teamwork for 329,000 organizations, including 87 of the Fortune 100. And, we are adding automated translation
support for meetings, shift scheduling for firstline workers, and new industry-specific offerings including healthcare and small business.”

He also mentioned Power Apps and Flow, interesting to me because they are the most successful so far of the company’s efforts to come up with a low-code development platform:

“Power BI, Power Apps and Flow are driving momentum with customers and have made us a leader in no-code app building and business analytics in the cloud.”

He also mentioned the pending GitHub acquisition, which he says is “an opportunity to bring our tools and services to new audiences while enabling GitHub to grow and retain its developer-first ethos.”

Note that despite the cloud growth, Windows remains the biggest single segment in terms of revenue.

Determining how much of Microsoft’s business is “cloud” is tricky. The figures in the productivity segment lump together Office 365 and on-premises products, while Office 365 itself is in part a subscription to desktop Office, so not pure cloud. Equally, the “intelligent cloud” segment includes on-premises server licenses. No doubt this fuzzing of what is and is not cloud in the figures is deliberate.