Microsoft jumps after earnings beat

Microsoft is up 1.8% at $65.40 a share on Friday morning after the company's fourth-quarter results topped Wall Street's expectations.

Microsoft's cloud computing business continued to post strong gains even as its traditional Windows and Office businesses showed signs of struggling.

Microsoft reported:

• Earnings per share of $0.84 on an adjusted basis, versus $0.79 expected.
• Revenue of $25.8 billion. That figure excludes Windows 10 revenue deferrals and results from the just-acquired LinkedIn, making it a clean beat on the $25.28 billion expected by Wall Street analysts.

Notably, LinkedIn contributed $228 million of revenue to the Productivity unit in the three weeks between the acquisition closing and the end of the quarter.

The bad news came out of the More Personal Computing unit, which dipped 5% versus a year ago to $11.8 billion. While Microsoft says that its business of licensing Windows to PC manufacturers was up 5%, the revenue from the Xbox-driven gaming business was down 3%.

When Microsoft last reported earnings in October 2016, the strength of its cloud business propelled the company's stock to an all-time high.

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