Microsoft sees profit decline, but does good business with cloud business | Economy

By our economics editors

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Jan 25, 2023 at 9:03 AM

Microsoft posted lower than expected revenue in the last three months of last year. Nevertheless, the tech giant closed 2022 well, because the group again did good business with its cloud activities in the last quarter. Despite the difficult economic conditions, the turnover of cloud platform Azure increased by 38 percent compared to a year earlier.

Total turnover grew by 2 percent to 52.7 billion dollars (48.4 billion euros). But the company saw its profit fall by 12 percent to $ 16.4 billion. This was mainly due to the expensive dollar and difficult economic conditions.

Although the cloud business performed surprisingly well in the last few months of last year, the profit of the consumer division halved. This section includes, for example, the Xbox game console and licenses for Windows. Although Microsoft used to make a lot of money with this part, it is now doing very badly due to the reduced demand for PCs and software.

On Monday it was announced that Microsoft will invest 10 billion dollars in the coming years in OpenAI, the company behind the popular program ChatGPT. That program has been getting a lot of attention lately, because it can create legible texts based on artificial intelligence.

With the investment, the company wants to stay ahead of competitors such as Amazon, Meta and Alphabet (Google’s parent company) when it comes to artificial intelligence.

The tech company announced last week that it would cut ten thousand jobs worldwide, also because of the deteriorating economy. The number of jobs disappearing amounts to about 5 percent of the workforce. The layoffs follow some cuts Microsoft made last year.

Image: ANP

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