Microsoft passes $80 per share in after-hours trading after blow-out quarter

Despite doom and gloom about its platforms, Microsoft had no problem impressing investors and analysts this quarter, generating earnings of $0.84 per share, well beyond the $0.72 per share analysts were expecting.

Microsoft managed to grow both revenue ($24.5 billion, up 12%) and profits ($6.6 billion, up 16%), showing the gains were not simply due to cutting.

The main growth centre was, of course, the cloud, with Azure revenue up 90% YoY. As predicted Microsoft was able to beat their 2015 goal of $20 billion in annualized run rate for the commercial cloud.

As a reward Microsoft’s share price climbed 3.4% in after-hours trading to $81.46, giving the company a market cap of more than $626 billion.

Notably, however, Google managed to overtake Microsoft both in revenue and profit, generating $6.7 billion in profit on $27.7 billion revenue. Google was rewarded by a similar share price increase, being up 3.13% in after-hours trading at the time of writing.