Share price fell

Cloud weakens: Microsoft makes stock market players nervous

(Bild: EPA)

Microsoft's cloud business has recently grown more slowly than expected. After investing billions in artificial intelligence, this is making Wall Street nervous: it sent the software giant's share price plummeting after the figures were announced. 

Microsoft reported a 29% increase in cloud revenues for the past quarter. Market experts had expected a good 30 percent - and in the previous quarter, the figure was 31 percent.

Expensive pact with OpenAI
The stock market reacts sensitively even to such slight differences, as Microsoft is a pioneer in the business with cloud services and artificial intelligence in particular. The company concluded an expensive pact with ChatGPT inventor OpenAI and is integrating its technology into all of its products. Access to AI functions is sold on a subscription model. Microsoft is also building expensive new data centers. Investors now want to see that the billions invested in AI are bearing fruit.

Chief Financial Officer Amy Hood said in a conference call that cloud growth will continue to slow down in the current quarter, but will pick up again in the next calendar year. Group CEO Satya Nadella emphasized that the number of professional users of Microsoft's AI functions under the name Copilot had doubled within three months.

AI business is becoming more relevant
At the same time, Microsoft attributed eight percentage points of the latest cloud growth to the AI business. In the previous quarter, it had been seven percentage points. All of this made investors a little more conciliatory again: after an initial drop of more than seven percent, Microsoft shares closed after-hours trading on Tuesday with a discount of 2.76 percent.

In other key figures, the Windows group exceeded market expectations. Quarterly sales grew by a good 15 percent year-on-year to 64.7 billion dollars (59.77 billion euros). Analysts had expected an average of 64.5 billion dollars. Profit rose from 20.08 billion dollars a year ago to 22.04 billion dollars.