In the third fiscal quarter, Microsoft increased sales and profits significantly. The company reported revenue of $ 30.6 billion on Wednesday, an increase of 14 percent over the previous year. Net profit increased 19 percent to $ 8.8 billion (7.9 billion euros). The profit driver was, as in previous quarters, the cloud business with companies such as Microsoft Azure.

The good quarterly figures give Microsoft a market capitalization of $ 990 billion in after-hours trading, bringing the company close to a $ 1 trillion market capitalization. So far, only Apple as a US company could crack this mark in August 2018. Apple’s market capitalization is back at about 975 billion dollars. Should it stay in the current after-hours trend, Microsoft should again become the most valuable company in the US, because the share price in the after-hours trading increased in some cases by slightly more than three percent.

Analysts had not expected such a high profit at Microsoft. Each share certificate yields a profit of $ 1.14. Expected was only a profit of about one dollar.

Microsoft Azure on the up

Above all, Microsoft benefits from the booming cloud business. At Azure alone, sales climbed 73 percent year-over-year. “Leading organizations of any size and in any industry trust Microsoft’s cloud,” said Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft. But also in other business segments, it went well for Microsoft in the last quarter: Office 365 increased its revenue by 30 percent, Dynamics 365 by 43 percent.

For Windows, too, things are looking pretty good: Windows OEM sales were up 9 percent, Windows Commercial Products and Cloud Services up 18 percent. The Microsoft subsidiary LinkedIn, the social network for maintaining business contacts, also performed very well year-on-year. Here, sales rose by 27 percent.