According to recently disclosed financial reports, both Microsoft and AMD have excellent quarterly profits and revenues. Thanks to various policies of the new crown epidemic, “stay at home and play video games” has become a good way to spend time in long-term home isolation. . On the other hand, according to PCWorld reports, both Microsoft and AMD said that the current supply of mainframes will remain tight.
AMD benefited from the strong demand for customized mainframe products and GPUs and CPUs, and its profits soared by approximately 450% from US$390 million a year ago to US$1.78 billion in the fourth quarter. Revenue in 2020 also increased by 53%, reaching 3.24 billion US dollars. More convincingly, AMD predicts that its current first-quarter revenue will be flat at $3.2 billion, indicating that current demand and revenue will continue. AMD’s embedded and semi-custom segment revenue was $1.28 billion, a year-on-year increase of 176%. Most of them come from game consoles, Sony PlayStation 5 and Microsoft Xbox Series S/X.
On the Microsoft side, strong quarterly revenue appeared on the financial report. Microsoft announced a profit of US$15.5 billion in the fourth quarter of 2020, a year-on-year increase of 33%, and revenue of US$43.1 billion, a year-on-year increase of 17%. As AMD’s earnings indicate, Microsoft has seen strong growth in its consumer business: Xbox’s content and service revenue increased by 40% due to the introduction of Xbox Series X and Series S consoles. But the more unexpected market segment is Microsoft’s Surface product line, which reported revenue of US$2.045 billion, a slight increase from US$1.976 billion in the same period last year. Overall, Microsoft generated $15.1 billion in revenue in personal businesses (including Windows, Xbox and Surface), an increase of 14%.
In Microsoft’s view, Xbox Series X and Series S are the most successful console releases in Microsoft history, with the largest sales in the first month. However, it is still very difficult to buy a new console. Microsoft expects that the development of the Xbox platform will continue to be strong. Consumers’ demand for Xbox Series X/S will still be great, so the supply is limited at this stage. Microsoft recorded more than $2 billion in revenue from third-party publishing games in the quarter. Xbox Live has 100 million monthly active users, and Game Pass now has 18 million subscribers. At the same time, Game Pass cloud games have appeared on Android phones and will be launched on PCs and iPhones in the next few months.
Microsoft’s Windows revenue also shows the trend of the PC market, which is dominated by the growth of cheap PCs: non-OEM version of Windows 10 Pro revenue increased by 24%; professional version revenue fell by 9%. Microsoft’s productivity business segment (including Office) grew by 13% to $13.4 billion. Microsoft’s artificial intelligence and cloud services (including Azure cloud services), grew by 14% to 15.1 billion US dollars.
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