XBOX is the real star for Microsoft

Today Microsoft reported its annual earnings. And the no. is USD 70 bn (a growth of 12%). In an environment of slowdowns across the world this double digit growth for such a large company is encouraging for the software industry.

The real winner in the last year seems to be the XBOX 360 which has been breaking all records of device sales and earning revenue handsomely for MS. The STB division is lurking close to the Windows division in terms of revenue and may overtake them in an year or two. Read on for some more details.

These days large corporations tend to mint money not only from their core businesses but also from their treasury operations – hence I prefer to look at their operating income. In this area, MS again outshines with growth of 13% to USD 27.16 bn. This also reflects a healthy margin of 39% on the business (Whew!!)

So where did the growth come from?

MBD:  This division earns the max. revenues (22 bn) for the company and is home to Office, Exchange and Dynamics suite of products. Revenue increased 16% for the full year with Office 2010 selling over 100 million licenses.

Windows & Live: The second largest revenue earner for the company at (19 bn) the revenue for the full year decreased 2%. Windows 7 sold over 400 million licenses. This division suffered a negative growth of 5.7% in their operating income. Significant to note is that 75% of income here comes from OEMs. Sale of PCs to businesses grew approximately 11% this year and sales of PCs to consumers declined approximately 1%. The decline in consumer PC sales included an approximately 32% decline in the sales of netbooks.

STB: Home to Windows Server, Windows Server, Visual Studio, System Center, SQL Server and other enterprise products the division grew 11% for the full year with revenues of (17 bn).

EDD: The XBOX division made 8 bn and 45% for the full year on the momentum of XBOX console, Kinect, Windows Phone and Xbox Live.

OSD: Online Services Division (home of Search and Advertising) grew 15% for the full year and made revenue of 2.5bn and is the only loss making division in the MS portfolio. Compare this to Google that makes over 9 bn in a single quarter.

Pressure can be seen on Windows division primarily coming from the consumer angle (mainly netbooks being replaced by tablets). Let’s hope that Windows 8 currently shrouded in mystery is able to reverse this trend in favour of MS.

You can read the earnings press release online.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Community Star Discussions and Future

In my continuing discussion with Community Stars across the country, I had a discussion today with Sadashiv. Though he works out of chennai and was here for a short trip, he found time today to discuss the opportunities for Community Star program to improve on. Some of thoughts we generated out of the discussion are as follows: 1. Community Stars are disengaged 'cause of lack of communication with them from MS. Better communication channels need to be developed. 2. Award experience and delivery of the Community Star benefits leave a lot to be desired. 3. Community Stars feel that MS is not laying enough importance on Community Stars and do not value their contributions much. More information needs to flow to CSs. From our end, we are doing the following: 1. Launch an extranet portal exclusively for Community Stars. We will host issue submission on this site. Also, we will share opportunities via this site e.g. beta opportunities 2. Re-launch the Community Star distributi
Read more

Making Vista Search your PST Files

Vista can index a lot of files and for some reason it doesn’t index the MS Outlook files.. maybe it is as Outlook is already doing the same.. in case you still want to search PST from Vista Search here is what you can do: Go to the Control Panel Choose "Indexing Options" Click on the "Advanced" button Click on the "File Types" tab Check the checkbox next to "PST" to include it in the search Select the bullet next to the option "Index Properties and File Contents" Click OK and OK again on the message that appears. This is especially useful for information workers like me who have large PST files and are forced to archive from time to time … indexing the archives would return the information from these forgotten folders as well :) Tip taken from On10.net Technorati tags: Outlook , PST , search
Read more

Technocratical Society

In the past days, I haven’t been blogging. A lot has happened in that time – terrorist attack in Mumbai, MNS lost track, global recession set in and Congress advanced in the country. Here’s an ode to the state of the society as viewed by my nephew, Shantanu Chandra who is in Class XII, Amity International, Gurgaon. The lines below capture the times prevailing and the need for us to drop the “chalta hai” attitude but with caution: This techie world of gizmo and gadget This eerie feeling of incongruous widget Which gives us pleasure and takes pain Along with it makes us insane; Absurdness to such a horizon from where one would never fall And still people call you “Microsoft—…That’s all” A teen like me can’t do without a mobile-call Even though I know it is killing my brain cells, after all; This techie world of gizmo and gadget Makes a non-techie guy weird and hollow The bureaucrat are more concerned about their Sunday meal Than to serve the poor people whose w
Read more