Microsoft presented the results for the October-December quarter on Tuesday, which revealed a 12% drop in profits, to 16.43 billion dollars, reflecting the economic uncertainty that led it to lay off 10,000 workers.
Excluding extraordinary results, profit was $2.32 per share, still above Wall Street’s expectation of $2.29.
Revenue was $52.75 billion, up 2 percent year-over-year, but below the $52.99 billion average expected by analysts polled by FactSet.
Microsoft last week attributed “macroeconomic conditions and changing customer priorities” to its decision to shed about 5 percent of its workforce.
Microsoft is one of several big tech companies that have recently announced massive layoffs, including Google, Amazon, Salesforce and Meta, Facebook’s holding company.
On Monday, to seek to integrate the latest advances in artificial technology into its products, Microsoft announced “billion-dollar investments over several years” in artificial intelligence ‘start-up’ OpenAI, maker of ChatGPT and other tools that can write human-readable text and computer code and generate images.
Source: TSF
