Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) surpassed the expectations of Wall Street in its earnings announcement last night, even though the PC market is on the decline. After the arrival of Satya Nadella, the new CEO of the company, shares are up around 8% and are 19% higher since last August when Steve Ballmer announced he would retire from the post of CEO. Microsoft shares have offered up more return than the Standard & Poor’s 500.
Investors, analysts confident on Nadella
In his appearance in front of analysts for the first time, Nadella turned out to impress them all. According to analysts, Nadella has the vision to transform Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT), which is struggling to catch up in the mobile segment. Investors are also upbeat on the strategies adopted by Nadella to focus on mobile, cloud, or Internet-based computing, which are aimed at diversifying Microsoft’s offerings from the traditional PC-based Windows business.
“This quarter is a nice step in the right direction for Nadella and Microsoft,” said Daniel Ives, an analyst at FBR Capital Markets. “We would characterize these results as solid in a choppy IT spending environment.”
Microsoft from a different perspective
During the earnings call, Nadella said that his first week was consumed in seeing Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) from a different perspective in a bid to start fresh. Also Nadella said he is acknowledging the reality of the new tech world in which Microsoft tumbled, falling behind Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) and Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOGL) (NASDAQ:GOOG). He said it is important to see the company with a fresh viewpoint to know the realities and future opportunities.
“What you can expect of Microsoft is courage in the face of reality; we will approach our future with a challenger mindset; we will be bold in our innovation,” he said
Nadella gave greater importance to cloud computing, which helped its server software business, and a slower decline in PC sales limited damage on the bottom line, a bit. Profit for Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) came in at $5.66 billion, or 68 cents a share, outpacing Street’s average of 63 cents per share. Sales fell 0.4% to $20.4 billion, meeting analysts’ average estimate. Sales of personal computers dropped 4.4% in the quarter, which is the eighth straight quarter of declines in the wake of increasing demand for tablets and smartphones.
