It is earning report season and for gaming interest, Microsoft took a turn yesterday and if the past week’s layoff served as an indicator that things did not go smoothly the last trimester for Microsoft, well, let’s look at the numbers.
Microsoft reported that it earned $52.7 billion in revenue and a net income of $16.4 billion during Q2, respectively a growth of 2% but a decline of 12%.
With the exception of the Cloud business with Azure, every business reported negative and mainly the most impacted are the Hardware department, specifically HoloLens and Surface.
HoloLens negative numbers has to do in main part that Microsoft was not granted a contract by the US military due Congress rejecting a proposed development of 6,900 Augmented Reality headsets based on the technology and remains to see if HoloLens has any more life left after being on of the focus of mid January layoffs.
Meanwhile, Surface revenue has also dropped a massive 39% in Q2, despite Microsoft launching the new Surface Pro 9, Surface Laptop 5, and Surface Studio 2 Plus devices just ahead of the holidays, signalizing that Surface is going for a niche.
With all that, a bad signal that the renewed heydays of PC that the pandemic brought are past beyond is that OEM business (PC makers buying licenses for pre-built Windows OS on PC) fell 39% compared to this time in 2022, which tells that PC makers are having trouble selling computers themselves.
Finally, Xbox and gaming and for the second quarter of the current fiscal year, Xbox fell down on revenue by 12% due lower than expected sales of hardware and counting that the Xbox Series S in particular, got a price drop during the holidays.
Game Pass closed the quarter at 120 million users and Microsoft sees this as a positive, including that Game Pass is between 10% and 15% of the Xbox revenue sources and it is already profitable.