Microsoft Corporation (MSFT) rose by +0.25% to $232.9. By announcing record revenue and earnings for its fiscal second quarter ended in December 2020, Microsoft blown up the Wall Street consensus on Tuesday. The U.S. tech giant’s quarterly revenues approached $40 billion for the first time, taking advantage of the improvements triggered by the health crisis, and its earnings exceeded $15 billion. In the second fiscal quarter, net income was $15.46 billion, or $2.03 per share, compared with $1.51 per share a year ago (up 34 percent). Sales totaled 43.1 billion dollars, up 17% from 36.9 billion dollars a year ago. The consensus was $40.23 billion in revenue with an EPS of $1.64.
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The group continued to benefit from the progress of the coronavirus pandemic-induced efforts. Azure, the cloud service of the company; as well as its remote working solution Teams were especially boosted by these improvements. In the fiscal second quarter, Microsoft said sales of Azure soared 50 percent, but the company did not announce the exact number, unlike rivals Amazon (with AWS, Amazon Web Services), and Alphabet. Microsoft announced that revenue from its Smart Cloud segment (including Azure) risen 23 percent to $14.6 billion, compared to the FactSet consensus-estimated $13.77 billion.
Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD) decreased by -6.2% to $88.84. On Tuesday, AMD posted better-than-expected performance for the fourth quarter. Per-share, adjusted quarterly earnings rose 63 percent to 52 cents. 47 cents was the consensus. The processor producer reported a solid 53 percent year-on-year revenue rise to $3.24 billion from a forecast of $3.02 billion. In particular, good sales of Ryzen processors helped the company. Furthermore, the financial targets of the company for the first fiscal quarter and the 2021 fiscal year surpass industry expectations.
AMD predicts sales of close to $3.2 billion (plus or minus $100 million) for the first quarter, relative to a forecast of $2.7 billion. Activity growth is forecast to be equivalent to 37 percent for 2021, compared to a median of 28 percent. The Santa Clara, California-based company can do even better than expected and reinforce its rise against Intel in force.
