Microsoft’s revenue has grown by 11 per cent for the quarter ending June 30, 2013, compared to the same period last year, but operating profit was down 5 per cent to US$6.1 billion.
The announcement led to a 7 per cent drop in shares, with the reduced profit being put down to slower PC sales.
The computing giant’s investment in its Surface tablet, which it launched in June last year, has also been costly with a US$900 million charge for inventory writedowns.
HumanIPO reported this week Microsoft had slashed the cost of Surface to try and boost sales which are at about one million.
“While our fourth quarter results were impacted by the decline in the PC market, we continue to see strong demand for our enterprise and cloud offerings, resulting in a record unearned revenue balance this quarter. We also saw increasing consumer demand for services like Office 365, Outlook.com, Skype, and Xbox LIVE,” said Amy Hood, chief financial officer at Microsoft.
“While we have work ahead of us, we are making the focused investments needed to deliver on long-term growth opportunities like cloud services.”
Microsoft’s fiscal year 2013 saw US$77.85 billion in revenue and US$26.76 billion in operating income.
