Reporting after-hours today, April 27, Microsoft (MSFT) beat analyst expectations on revenue (reporting $41.7 billion versus a Wall Street forecast of $41.05 billion) and earnings per share (reporting $2.03 a share versus $1.78 a share.)
And still shares fell by 2.62% to $255.10 in after-hours trading. (The shares had traded as low as $254.10 in the after-hours session.)
Great wasn’t good enough for a stock that had climbed 10.6% in the last month, 17.84% for 2021 as of the close on April 26, and 51.07% in the last year.
Does the drop set the stage for other BIG TECH stock reporting this week–Alphabet (GOOG) today, Apple (AAPL) and Facebook (FB) tomorrow, and Amazon (AMZN) on Thursday.
Wall Street’s closest scrutiny went to Microsoft’s cloud operations. Revenue from the intelligent cloud unit came n at $13.04 billion versus expectations for $12.6 billion. That was a 23% year over year increase.
The problem may have been that Wall Street was expecting even more growth from the Azure cloud business in a year when the pandemic has forced so many businesses to move more functions to the cloud.
