Microsoft chief Satya Nadella said the company’s cloud business is “seeing significant customer momentum”, as its mobile efforts continued with the expected downward trajectory.

Revenue in the “More Personal Computing” unit for the most recent (fiscal fourth) quarter, which houses the mobile business, declined by 3.7 per cent to $8.9 billion. But Phone revenue declined by 71 per cent, as Microsoft effectively ends its presence in the market – at least for the medium term.

Earlier this year, Microsoft announced deals which will see it effectively exiting the feature phone market, offloading a business it acquired with its Nokia devices buy.

And while it has made noises about offering a smartphone targeting its core enterprise/productivity market along the lines of its Surface tablets, this has not so far come to fruition.

Windows 10
Microsoft was also recently forced to slow its timeline for Windows 10 user growth, which was attributed to weakness in the mobile space.

In a conference call, Nadella said user growth is only one measure of Windows 10 success.

“Going forward, we will track progress by regularly reporting the growth of Windows 10 monthly active devices, in addition to progress on three aspects of our Windows strategy: first, deliver more value and innovation, particularly for enterprise customers; second, grow new monetisation from services across a unified Windows platform; third, innovate in new device categories in partnership with our OEMs,” he said.

With regard to Surface, the company said that revenue had increased 9 per cent to $965 million, driven by its latest-generation Surface Pro 4 and Surface Book.

Revenue from Microsoft’s Intelligent Cloud unit increased 6.6 per cent to $6.71 billion, with server products and cloud service revenue up 5 per cent and Azure revenue doubling.

And revenue in the company’s Productivity and Business Process unit increased 4.6 per cent to $6.97 billion. Office commercial products and cloud services sales grew 5 per cent and Office consumer products and cloud services revenue increased by 19 per cent.

Group results
On a group level, for the fiscal fourth quarter, the company reported a net profit of $3.12 billion, compared with a prior-year loss of $3.2 billion, on revenue of $20.61 billion, down from $22.18 billion.

Last year’s bottom line was impacted by a massive impairment charge, related to its phones activity.