Microsoft earnings just got released prematurely 10 minutes before market close, and aside from growing revenues 5% in the 2nd quarter to $19.9 Billion, the company’s slides reveal some impressive growth numbers for their Entertainment and Devices devision, which generated $3.7 in revenue this quarter versus $2.4 last year, and sold 8 million Kinects, a motion controller for the Xbox 360, in the two months since its launch.
All in all division revenue is up 55% this quarter. Included in this number are sales of Xbox 360, the Kinect, the Zune and Windows Phone 7. Xbox Live memberships grew 30% and Xbox 360 console unit sales were up 21%, making“the world’s fastest growing game console” according to Microsoft. For those of you that have given up on Microsoft understanding consumer electronics, its increasing dominance in the gaming and device sector is a light at the end of the tunnel.
Said Microsoft CFO Peter Klein about the division’s success,
“We are enthusiastic about the consumer response to our holiday lineup of products, including the launch of Kinect. The 8 million units of Kinect sensors sold in just 60 days far exceeded our expectations. The pace of business spending, combined with strong consumer demand, led to another quarter of operating margin expansion and solid earnings per share growth.”
Watch out Wii.
Microsoft, founded in 1975 by Bill Gates and Paul Allen, is a veteran software company, best known for its Microsoft Windows operating system and the Microsoft Office suite of productivity software. Starting in 1980 Microsoft formed a partnership with IBM allowing Microsoft to sell its software package with the computers IBM manufactured. Microsoft is widely used by professionals worldwide and largely dominates the American corporate market. Additionally, the company has ventured into hardware with consumer products such as the Zune and...
Kinect for Xbox 360, or simply Kinect (originally known by the code name Project Natal),[7] is a “controller-free gaming and entertainment experience” by Microsoft for the Xbox 360 video game platform, and may later be supported by PCs via Windows 8. Based around a webcam-style add-on peripheral for the Xbox 360 console, it enables users to control and interact with the Xbox 360 without the need to touch a game controller, through a natural user interface using gestures and...
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