Microsoft shares jump after strong second quarter results

Buoyed by its growing cloud business, the US-based technology giant Microsoft on Thursday announced positive results for the second quarter of fiscal 2016-17 ending December 31 that led to the a 3 percent jump in its shares.

In a statement, the Redmond, Washington state-based company, said that revenue for the second quarter was $25.7 billion, beating market forecasts.

While revenue in the "Intelligent Cloud" segment grew 5 percent from the previous year to $6.3 billion. Within this unit, the server products and cloud services revenue grew 10 percent and "Azure Cloud" revenue grew 140 percent.

Over one third of the Fortune 500 companies have chosen our Enterprise Mobility solutions, up nearly three times from the same quarter last year, the statement said, adding that the newly-launched Windows 10 is active on over 200 million devices.

"Businesses everywhere are using the Microsoft Cloud as their digital platform to drive their ambitious transformation agendas," said Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella in the statement.

"Businesses are also piloting Windows 10, which will drive deployments beyond 200 million active devices," the Indian-born top executive added.

During the quarter, Microsoft returned $6.5 billion to shareholders in the form of share repurchases and dividends.

However, revenue in productivity and business processes declined 2 percent to $6.7 billion and revenue in personal computing declined 5 percent to $12.7 billion.

On the other side, revenue for Windows Surface devices increased 29 percent driven by the launch of Surface Pro 4 and Surface Book while online gaming "Xbox Live" monthly active users grew 30 percent year-over-year to a record 48 million.

"It was a strong holiday season for Microsoft highlighted by Surface and Xbox," said Kevin Turner, chief operating officer at Microsoft.