A sales shift fuels MSFT

Article Excerpt

MICROSOFT CORP. $74 (Nasdaq symbol MSFT; Aggressive Growth Portfolio, Manufacturing & Industry sector; Shares outstanding: 7.7 billion; Market cap: $569.8 billion; Price-to-sales ratio: 6.4; Dividend yield: 2.1%; TSINetwork Rating: Above Average; www.microsoft.com) continues to gain from its move to sell its software as a subscription service. In its fiscal 2017 fourth quarter, ended June 30, 2017, the company’s revenue rose 13.1%, to $23.3 billion from $20.6 billion a year earlier. Earnings jumped 39.8%, to $7.7 billion from $5.5 billion. Due to fewer shares outstanding, earning per share gained 42.0%, to $0.98 from $0.69. Microsoft’s cloud-based services let users store programs and files on remote servers using the Internet. Those services now contribute $18.9 billion to overall revenue. Microsoft expects that contribution to expand to $20 billion or more by the end of fiscal 2018. In the quarter, the company’s public cloud platform, Microsoft Azure, saw its revenues increase 97% from a year earlier. Similarly, the revenue from the cloud-based Office 365 suite of…