Microsoft has recently reported on its financial results for the first quarter of fiscal year 2016. The data beat Wall Street’s forecasts and provoked a surge of the company’s shares making them touch a 15-year high.
Microsoft announced that its net income was up 2% to $4.6 billion compared with the same quarter a year ago. The company’s revenue declined by 12% to $20.4 billion. Besides, it earned 67 cents a share excluding items on adjusted sales of $21.66 billion in its fiscal first quarter of 2016. However, analysts had anticipated the company to earn 59 cents a share on sales of $21.03 billion for the quarter ended September 30.
Amid the financial reports, shares of Microsoft increased by 8.3% to $52 a share hitting the highest level since 2000.
However, the company announced another wave of staff reduction. It laid off about 1,000 employees, which amounts to less than 1% of its global workforce.
Moreover, Microsoft is planning to launch its own payment service to compete with such technical majors as Google, Apple, and Samsung. However, the company has all chances to benefit from payment services as they are becoming more and more popular. According to the estimates, in 2014, global mobile payment transactions totaled $235 billion and by 2017, mobile payments will top $720 billion.
