In this morning’s lets-talk-about-any-finances-that-aren’t-our-own news, Microsoft has posted its 2023 fiscal financial results, and it’s… a lot… According to the report, Microsoft made $52.7 billion in revenue and a net income of $16.4 billion.
To put that in amounts South Africans can understand and digest, the software company has brought in R899688076000,00. This means the company’s revenue is up by 2 per cent, but its net income has dropped by 12 per cent. The report was released days after Microsoft announced that it had laid off over 10,000 employees.
Many of the layoffs mentioned above directly resulted from congress stepping in to deny the US Army’s request to purchase over 6,900 headsets based on Microsoft’s HoloLens technology, resulting in job cuts in the HoloLens division. Xbox sales have also dropped by 13 per cent, with a 12 per cent drop in Xbox content and services revenue.
Microsoft has chalked the decrease in Xbox revenue up to the lower selling point of the Xbox Series S / X consoles over the holiday period. The company had dropped the console’s price to $249.99 to drum up excitement for its Xbox Game Pass console.
The software powerhouse also forecast a brutal quarter regarding revenue and hardware, and the results speak volumes about the state of the PC industry. PC shipments fell by 29 per cent in 2022, the most significant shipment decline since the mid-1990s.
One of the causes for this steep decline in PC purchases is likely because of the previous boom of purchases when the world first entered lockdown. Now people are sitting with relatively new PCs already, and there isn’t a big motivation to upgrade.
The company is also facing significant pushback from regulators over the planned $68.7 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard. From the European Commission conducting an in-depth investigation to the FTC suing Microsoft to try and block the purchase after weeks of back and forth between Microsoft, Sony, and regulators over competition concerns and the future of Call of Duty.