Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) shares were down 1.61% on Tuesday but advanced 4.24% to $55.34 upon seeing stronger than expected earnings figures. The company has a market cap of $419.33 billion at 7.86 billion shares outstanding. Shares have been trading in a 52-week range of $39.72 to $56.85.

In its latest earnings release, Microsoft Corporation reported revenue of $22.64 billion, buoyed by 102% growth in revenues for its key cloud product Azure. Earnings per share came in at 69 cents versus consensus estimates at 58 cents. This was also an improvement over previous year earnings per share of 62 cents and revenue of $22.18 billion. Net income came in at $3.1 billion.

The Microsoft Cloud is seeing significant customer momentum and we’re well-positioned to reach new opportunities in the year ahead,” CEO Satya Nadella said in a statement.

Office 365 commercial revenue saw growth of 54% while revenue rose 7% for the intelligent cloud segment to $6.7 billion, outpacing estimates at $6.61 billion. The quarterly results also indicated that Microsoft Corporation made progress in its cost-cutting efforts and in its plans to make up for its falling phone business. Phone sales fell 71% during the quarter but the company likely saved around $500-800 million in reducing hardware activities.

So far, the company hasn’t provided any updates on how its acquisition of LinkedIn impacted financial results but it did provide the rationale for the acquisition, which is to pursue collaborative tools and services related to its cloud offerings. LinkedIn could be useful for industries related to hiring, training, and marketing.

Microsoft Corporation is a company that is engaged in developing, licensing and supporting a range of software products and services. It also designs and sells hardware, and delivers online advertising to the customers. In addition, the company offers cloud-based solutions that provide customers with software, services and content over the Internet by way of shared computing resources located in centralized data centers. It provides consulting and product and solution support services.

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