Microsoft Shares Rise on FY25 Q3 Earnings, Surpassing Expectations

Right, so yesterday, Microsoft dropped their FY25 Q3 results and, yeah, it was basically all sunshine and rainbows. Their shares got a little bump, like 1.2 points after hours. I guess the stock market gods were pleased or something. Who knows, they might go even higher once everyone gets their coffee this morning.

The big cheese himself, Satya Nadella, was all smiles, talking about how their cloud revenue hit a cool $42.4 billion. That’s up 20% from last year. Not too shabby, right? He was all, “People just can’t get enough of what we’re offering.” Or something like that.

So, get this, Microsoft raked in $70.1 billion in revenue, a neat 13% increase from the previous year. They’ve got $32 billion in operating income and a net income of $25.8 billion. Mind-boggling numbers, seriously. The earnings per share? $3.46. Apparently, Wall Street didn’t see that coming.

Their Productivity and Businesses stuff, like Microsoft 365 and Dynamics 365, shot up 10%. On the cloud side, which has fancy things like Azure, they grew 21%. Just Azure, on its own, jumped up 33%. And the personal computing bit, where Windows hangs out, was up 6%.

Oh, and gaming — Xbox and all that jazz — also saw a 6% rise. But, get this, while the hardware dipped 6%, their content and services grew by 8%. And PC Game Pass? That went wild, growing 45% year-over-year. They got a whopping 150 million hours of Xbox Cloud Gaming streamed this quarter. That’s up by 10 million! Like, who’s even keeping track of these things?

Microsoft was like, “Hey, we threw $9.7 billion back at shareholders with dividends and stock buybacks.” Nice little thank you card if you ask me.

But, they did throw a tiny bit of cold water on things, talking about those pesky global tariffs and geopolitical things that could make the money party a little iffy in the near future. They’re still pretty gung-ho on AI and cloud as growth rockets. Oh, and let’s not forget their dabbling with quantum computing. Ever heard of the Majorana-1 breakthrough? Yeah, me neither.

By the way, they went on and on about how people are really digging stuff like Copilot and Bing. Copilot usage went up 35% quarter over quarter. That’s like a whole bunch of folks. And Bing? 22% boost in engagement. That’s a thing, apparently.

Strangely, not a word about their Surface gadgets in this report. Maybe next time, folks. But rumor is, they’ve got some shiny new Surface toys coming soon under the Copilot+ range. Watch this space, I guess!