Microsoft’s latest financial report looks good – except for the part about how many Lumia smartphones it has sold of late.
The company has just revealed its Q3 financial results, which leads up to March 31. It made a net profit of $3.8 billion on $20.5 billion revenue, which actually represents a drop year-on-year.
But the biggest drop here is reserved for those smartphone figures. Microsoft sold just 2.3 million Lumia phones during its latest quarter.
Now, the Windows Phone market is infamously bad, but even by such low standards this was an awful quarter. It represents a drop from 8.6 million handsets sold during the same period last year – that’s a 73 percent cut.
Microsoft’s mobile revenue dropped accordingly by 46 percent.
All of which makes Microsoft’s overall results seem pretty good. Indeed, elsewhere things are looking a good deal rosier.
Surface sales increased 61 per cent year-on-year, representing growth of $1.1 billion over the past three months. Microsoft is thanking the Surface Pro 4 and Surface Book for that timely boost.
There’s also been growth all-round in Microsoft’s cloud services, with Office commercial revenue growing 7 percent and Office consumer revenue growing 6 percent. Azure revenue grew 120 percent.
Microsoft is a lot more quiet than it used to be on the Xbox front, thanks to Sony’s unassailable position with the PS4, but Xbox Live monthly active users actually grew 26 percent to 46 million over the past three months.
Search ad revenue grew by 18 percent, thanks to growing Windows 10 usage.
Related: Windows 10 Mobile review
Even some of the losses are positive, such as the fact that Windows OEM revenue declined 2 percent. That’s actually better than the PC market.
All in all, a pretty good quarter for Microsoft all things considered – but something clearly needs to be done about Windows Phone.
Next, check out our comparison of Windows 10 and Windows 95:
Would you consider a Lumia as your next smartphone? Let us know in the comments.
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Editorial independence
Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
Professional conduct
We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.