Microsoft Reports Record Earnings

Microsoft released today its second-quarter revenue, which quiet impressively tops up at $19.95 billion for their quarter that ended December 31.

Most analysts predicted Microsoft’s earnings to only be at 69 center per share, however since the recent launch of Kinect, their controller-less game add-on their earning are up to 77 cents per share. “We are enthusiastic about the consumer response to our holiday lineup of products, including the launch of Kinect. The 8 million units of Kinect sensors sold in just 60 days far exceeded our expectations,” said Peter Klein, CFO at Microsoft. The addition of holiday sales, and the holiday demand for the new slim Xbox sent Microsoft’s profits skyrocketing.

Microsoft managed to make $6.63 billion in profit for Q2 in 2011. Comparing Microsoft’s and Apple’s earnings Apple only came out with $6 billion at the end of 2010, leaving Microsoft on top as one of the most profitable companies, for now.

It is no surprise that the Entertainment & Devices Division at Microsoft experienced a 55% revenue growth. Like the years before the Business Division at Microsoft grew 24% from the Office 2010 launch, which the 2010 version has been Microsoft’s fastest-selling version in history. Office 2010 sales grew from last quarter to over 50% over Office 2007. With all the success Microsoft also notes that Windows 7 is its fastest-growing operating system in the history of the company, and the recent System on a Chip demonstrates that Microsoft is pushing forward to make their operating system powerful enough to run anywhere.

Earnings Highlights:

• Windows Phone 7 launched during the quarter in 30 countries and on 60 operators and nine different devices. Microsoft announced developers are adding Windows Phone 7 applications to the marketplace at a rate of over 100 per day.
• Microsoft has now sold over 300 million Windows 7 licenses, and is now running on over 20% of Internet-connected PCs.
• Internet Explorer 9 is Microsoft’s fastest downloaded beta browser of all time with over 20 million downloads to date.
• Bing completed the integration of Yahoo! search in the U.S. and Canada and continues to gain share.
• Microsoft announced that the next version of Windows will support System on a Chip architectures.