Microsoft sees Surface and Xbox sales soar

Microsoft has more than doubled sales from its Surface tablets compared to last year. Xbox sales also increased by 102 percent, due to the launch of the Xbox One in 28 new countries. Sales of Lumia phones rose slightly.

The Surface Pro 3 is a hit with students, professionals and the enterprise market, Microsoft says in the presentation of the quarterly figures. The company does not disclose exact sales figures, but does say that the Surface branch’s quarterly turnover increased by 127 percent compared to last year, from 316 million euros to 717 million euros. The Surface Pro 3 has a price from 800 euros, which makes it obvious that the maximum sales are around or under a million.

Xbox sales also increased by 58 percent. In terms of numbers, Microsoft sold 102 percent more Xbox consoles than in the same period last year. In total, it concerns 2.4 million units, but it is not clear how much of this concerns the Xbox One. Microsoft gave no details on that.

Microsoft also shipped 9.3 million Lumia devices in the quarter, an increase of 5.6 percent compared to the 8.8 million units sold by Nokia last year. Especially in Europe, the Lumias do well according to the group and the cheaper models such as the Lumia 630 and 530 would gain market share for the company. Microsoft saw the turnover from Windows Phone decline sharply by 46 percent and the company also struggled with high costs due to the Nokia acquisition. Microsoft expects to break even in the mobile area throughout the year.

Sales from OEM licenses for Windows and Office licenses for consumers decreased. However, the number of customers for Office 365 grew by 25 percent compared to the previous quarter to 7 million. Partly due to the latter, the turnover of the Commercial cloud branch grew by 128 percent, but good results from Azure and Dynamics CRM also contributed to this. In total, Microsoft’s quarterly revenue amounted to $23.20 billion, or $18.33 billion, a 25 percent increase over last year. However, profit fell from 4.1 billion euros to 3.6 billion euros.