Microsoft Corporation (MSFT) Q4 FY26 Earnings Call Transcript

Operator00:00

Greetings, and welcome to the Microsoft fiscal year 2026 fourth quarter earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen only mode. A question and answer session will follow the formal presentation.

Operator00:16

If anyone should require operator assistance, please press star zero on your telephone keypad. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. It is now my pleasure to introduce Jonathan Neilson, Vice President of Investor Relations.

Operator00:18

Please go ahead.

Jonathan Neilson00:34

Good afternoon. and thank you for joining us today. on the call with me are Satya Nadella, chairman and chief executive officer, Amy Hood, chief financial officer, Alice Jolla, chief accounting officer, and Brian Defoe, deputy general counsel and corporate secretary.

Jonathan Neilson00:50

On the Microsoft investor relations website, you can find our earnings press release and financial summary slide deck, which is intended to supplement our prepared remarks during today's call and provides the reconciliation of differences between GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures.

Jonathan Neilson01:02

More detailed outlook slides will be available on the Microsoft Investor Relations website when we provide outlook commentary on today's call. on this call, we will discuss certain non-GAAP items.

Jonathan Neilson01:23

The non-GAAP financial measures provided should not be considered as a substitute for or superior to the measures of financial performance prepared in accordance with GAAP. they are included as additional clarifying items to aid investors in further understanding the company's fourth quarter performance in addition to the impact these items and events have on the financial results.

Jonathan Neilson01:43

All growth comparisons we make on the call today relate to the corresponding period of last year unless otherwise noted. We will also provide growth rates in constant currency when available as a framework for assessing how our underlying businesses performed excluding the effect of foreign currency rate fluctuations.

Jonathan Neilson01:56

Where growth rates are the same in constant currency we will refer to the growth rate only. We will post our prepared remarks to our website immediately following the call until the complete transcript is available.

Jonathan Neilson02:13

Today's call is being webcast live and recorded. If you ask a question it will be included in our live transmission in the transcript and in any future use of the recording. you can replay the call and view the transcript on the Microsoft Investor Relations website.

Jonathan Neilson02:44

During this call we will be making forward looking statements which are predictions projections or other statements about future events these statements are based on current expectations and assumptions that are subject to risks and uncertainties actual results could materially differ because of factors discussed in today's earnings press release in the comments made during this conference call and in the risk factor section of our form 10-K, forms 10-Q and other reports and filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Jonathan Neilson02:54

We do not undertake any duty to update any forward looking statement. and with that I'll turn the call over to Satya.

Prepared remarks

Satya Nadella03:31

Thank you very much Jonathan it was a very strong close to what was a record fiscal year for us. All up our annual revenue surpassed 331 billion dollars up 18% Microsoft cloud surpassed 214 billion dollars up 27 and Azure surpassed 100 billion dollars up 41. Going forward we have two goals first ensuring AI empowers every person amplifying their agency and ambition and second empowering every organization to build their own continuous learning loop and ensuring that they don't outsource their core IP.

Satya Nadella03:49

Now let's talk about how we're delivering this across our stack starting with our AI platform and infrastructure. We added 31 new data centers across five continents this quarter bringing the total to 88 this year as we expand our footprint in response to accelerating demand.

Satya Nadella04:07

We're also bringing capacity online faster than ever over the last fiscal year we've reduced dock to live times for new GPUs in our largest regions by nearly 50% all up we added another gigawatt of capacity this quarter and remain on track to roughly double our overall capacity in just two years.

Satya Nadella04:21

We're also getting more from the infrastructure we already have by optimizing across silicon systems and software For example, we increased the throughput for Copilot workloads 4x since the start of the year.

Satya Nadella04:40

AI sovereignty is increasingly top of mind for our customers and we are expanding our offerings to meet that need. Just last week, we announced a partnership with Mistral to bring its models to Microsoft Sovereign Cloud enabling customers to run them across public, customer controlled and fully disconnected environments.

Satya Nadella04:51

We also continue to modernize our fleet with our own silicon innovation alongside the latest from NVIDIA and AMD. Maya 200 continues to scale.

Satya Nadella05:00

It delivers 30% better performance per dollar than the latest generation hardware in our fleet and is now supporting both OpenAI and MAI models.

Satya Nadella05:09

And we will be among the first cloud providers to deploy next generation rack scale AI infrastructure based on AMD Helios and NVIDIA Vera Rubin.

Satya Nadella05:24

When it comes to running agents CPUs are just as important as GPUs. Our Cobalt VMs are powering both our own first party workloads as well as workloads for customers including Adobe, Arm, Elastic, OpenAI, Sprinklr and TomTom.

Satya Nadella05:33

And by the end of this month we expect to have our Cobalt 200 racks in over 25 data centers around the world as we rapidly expand capacity.

Satya Nadella05:41

Now let me turn to the end-to-end platform we're building on this infrastructure to run govern and distribute apps and agents.

Satya Nadella06:00

It starts with model choice. Every customer wants the right model for each task based on quality latency cost and compliance. We offer the broadest model catalog in the cloud with over 11,000 models including the latest from OpenAI Anthropic Mistral XAI as well as our own MAI family.

Satya Nadella06:21

Since the start of the year we have seen 5x increase in the number of customers building with models from multiple providers Levi Strauss and Co for example is using models from OpenAI and Anthropic on Foundry as it brings more than thousand domain specific agents into a unified enterprise AI platform.

Satya Nadella06:39

We're also accelerating our own model development. We announced more than a dozen new models across image voice transcription coding security including our first reasoning model MAI Thinking One all with cost efficient inference at the core for the enterprise use cases.

Satya Nadella07:52

We are co-designing these models with our silicon and we are seeing 40% better performance per watt when running MAI models on Maya 200. but more importantly we're building a new model system where the harness context memory and action space are separate from any one model family thereby moving the frontier on the cost to outcome curve and it's not just about cost it's also has the added benefit of business continuity and resilience because every model is substitutable this is the system we're using in our products with great results for example millions of developers have used MAI Code One Flash on GitHub Copilot achieving higher code acceptance rates and 10% lower median token usage while still having access to frontier capabilities from OpenAI and Anthropic in Excel MAI Code One Flash is delivering comparable quality to GPT 5.6 for the most common tasks while operating at significantly lower costs in security MAI Cyber One flash achieves better performance than much larger Mythos model but at half the cost when combined with our multi-agent security harness.

Satya Nadella08:14

More broadly across our model implementations we are seeing significant efficiency gains including 89% reduction of GPU costs in Dynamics 365 with MAI voice two flash and up to 84% reduced GPU costs in PowerPoint with MAI Image 2.5. And this system is available to any company to use as part of Foundry.

Satya Nadella08:23

The next layer is the enterprise data and context. The data estate is evolving from primarily supporting apps used by people to supporting agents.

Satya Nadella08:35

Customers are rapidly adopting our AI optimized databases like Cosmos DB and Postgres SQL to give agents fast secure access to real time data and context they need for memory and retrieval.

Satya Nadella08:50

Postgres SQL revenue was up 55% accelerating for the third consecutive quarter also the number of Postgres SQL customers also using Foundry increased 80% as customers increasingly choose it as the database for AI workloads.

Satya Nadella09:40

And we are going further with Horizon DB our new fully managed Postgres SQL service on Azure which delivers three times the throughput of self-managed deployments. when it comes to analytics we are now have over 40,000 paid Fabric customers up more than 60% year over year and over 17,000 customers now use Foundry and Fabric up 60% year over year as enterprises connect agents to real-time operational analytical and unstructured data in Fabric this quarter we also introduced Rayfin the agent first SDK that delivers a backend as a service for building apps in Fabric More than 2,500 customers have already used Rayfin and is now powering the backends for apps created with Replit 2.

Satya Nadella09:57

On top of this data estate, we are building an IQ layer that combines data with model capabilities to deliver the right context at the right time. Tens of thousands of customers including nearly 90% of the Fortune 500 are already grounding their agents in enterprise context with Foundry, Fabric and Work IQ.

Satya Nadella10:08

And this quarter we introduced Web IQ which gives agents access to real world intelligence from across the web. It is already being used by the most popular AI assistants including ChatGPT.

Satya Nadella10:28

Beyond model choice, data and context, we are building Foundry as the complete app and agent stack. It gives agents access to the IQ layer, the tools they use along with durable state and memory, secure sandboxes, rubrics and evals and even their own self-improvement loops.

Satya Nadella10:33

We now have 100,000 Foundry customers and revenue more than doubled year over year.

Satya Nadella10:44

Telefonica for example adopted Foundry as the foundation of its corporate agentic platform with its first wave of agents tackling mission critical network operations.

Satya Nadella11:02

All up the number of Foundry customers at 1 trillion tokens annualized run rate increased 4x year over year. And finally with Agent 365 we offer a control plane that extends companies existing governance identity security and management frameworks to agents they build.

Satya Nadella11:11

Just two months in Agent 365 now has nearly 40 million agents registered across tens of thousands of companies.

Satya Nadella11:29

Now let me turn to the apps and agents we are building on top of this platform for individuals and organizations. When it comes to knowledge work we now have over 30 million paid Microsoft 365 Copilot seats with net seat ads more than doubling quarter over quarter.

Satya Nadella11:45

Copilot is evolving rapidly from chat to co-work to autopilots. Last month we made co-work generally available helping customers complete multi-step tasks grounded in their work data while meeting enterprise security and compliance requirements.

Satya Nadella11:55

This quarter we also introduced autopilots autonomous long running agents with full enterprise compliance including always-on personal agent powered by Open Claw.

Satya Nadella12:04

And this quarter we are bringing these Copilot experiences together including code in one super app spanning both consumer and commercial experiences.

Satya Nadella12:16

This is a major step forward and I look forward to sharing more soon. More broadly we have steadily been improving the quality and performance of Copilot and have been delighted by the recent customer feedback.

Satya Nadella12:33

Over the last three quarters user satisfaction scores have doubled and are now at an all-time high and this quarter alone we cut latency by 25%. These quality improvements together with continued product innovation are driving record usage intensity.

Satya Nadella12:34

The number

Satya Nadella12:55

Of conversations per user nearly doubled year over year average weekly engagement is on par with Outlook and Teams. And the time from deployment to what we think of as high usage meaning monthly active usage about 80% across a customer's user base has fallen from months to just days over the past year.

Satya Nadella13:16

The number of customers with more than 50,000 seats increased over 7x year over year and the number of enterprise customers deploying Copilot to the majority of their information workers grew nearly 75% quarter over quarter a signal of how central Copilot has become to their operations.

Satya Nadella13:31

NHS England for example is rolling out Copilot to 505,000 clinicians and staff the largest healthcare deployment of its kind after a trial showed it saved employees an average of 43 minutes per day.

Satya Nadella13:44

KPMG is expanding its deployment across its global workforce of more than 276,000 professional and HSBC committed to 200,000 seats to accelerate its workforce transformation.

Satya Nadella13:57

AstraZeneca, Boeing, Infosys, Coke Inc, Procter & Gamble, Celantis, Tata Consulting Service, University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, Wells Fargo and Wipro each purchased 60,000 or more.

Satya Nadella14:25

And we have been encouraged by the response to our new E7 suite as customers increasingly go all in on an integrated AI offering that brings together Copilot, E5, Entra and Agent 365. Just two months after launch hundreds of enterprise customers have already purchased millions of seats and this quarter EY deployed E7 to 400,000 employees in our largest win to date.

Satya Nadella14:35

In addition to this we are also evolving our business model beyond per seat to per seat plus consumption further expanding our TAM and delivering more customer value.

Satya Nadella14:42

Earlier this month we added usage based billing to co-work with thousands of customers already paying for and actively using it.

Satya Nadella15:09

In biz apps we have been reinventing Dynamics 365 for an agent first world. We are exposing over 650,000 MCP actions across sales finance supply chain HR and customer service so that agents can now access business context and take action using the same data models, rules, permissions, security guardrails, and audit trails as any application user.

Satya Nadella15:14

And we are also moving from seats to seats plus consumption model.

Satya Nadella15:27

Customer service is at the forefront of this transformation with usage based credit consumption in this category up 4x quarter over quarter with customers like Northern Trust using our tools to drive proactive intelligence.

Satya Nadella15:42

When it comes to developers GitHub Copilot now has 50 million users this quarter we introduced usage based billing and have continued to see business and enterprise seat growth and also significant consumption revenue after the new model went into effect.

Satya Nadella15:58

Copilot revenue accelerated over 60% quarter over quarter all up GitHub now has 225 million users as organizations across every industry including over 90% of the Fortune 500 choose GitHub for their AI powered development.

Satya Nadella16:06

The agentic era is being built on GitHub every major coding agent runs on the platform and one in three pull requests on GitHub now involves an agent.

Satya Nadella16:07

In

Satya Nadella16:25

Security we are helping customers both secure their AI deployments and use AI to strengthen their security posture. To date Purview has audited over 50 billion Copilot interactions to meet compliance obligations up nearly 360% year over year.

Satya Nadella16:39

And earlier this week we introduced Project Perception a complete multimodal agentic security system that brings together teams of agents to simulate attacks investigate threats and drive remediation.

Satya Nadella16:45

As Perception moves beyond private preview we expect to bring it to customers through a consumption based offering.

Satya Nadella16:55

In healthcare we're on pace to automate over 100 million patient encounters this calendar year including 28 million this quarter up 2x year over year.

Satya Nadella17:16

Mass General Brigham rolled out Dragon Copilot to over 4000 providers and after a study found ambient AI reduced burnout by 21% and in science Microsoft Discovery now broadly available provides a comprehensive platform for building and governing agentic workflows for science and engineering.

Satya Nadella17:32

Early customers include BHP, GSK, Pacific Northwest National Lab. Across both our high value agentic experiences and the AI platform and infrastructure we are focused on helping customers turn AI into measurable outcomes.

Satya Nadella18:07

The most comprehensive and valuable data in the world is inside each of the customer tenants and therefore there is a tremendous opportunity to turn customers workflows domain knowledge and accumulated judgment into AI systems that learn and improve with every usage to help customers capture that opportunity this month we launched Microsoft Frontier Core the largest outcome driven engineering organization in the industry We will embed 6,000 industry and engineering experts with customers to co-design co-innovate and continuously improve AI systems at scale.

Satya Nadella18:18

We've been testing this model over the past year completing over 330 projects across 164 customers including many of the world's leading companies across industries.

Satya Nadella18:27

For example our FDE teams worked with Nova Nordisk to build an agent that helps analyze clinical data while meeting its strict compliance requirements.

Satya Nadella18:40

And we partnered with LSEG to embed AI into LSEG Workspace helping finance professionals ask complex questions and quickly find answers across structured and unstructured financial content.

Satya Nadella18:43

Finally let me talk about devices and consumer.

Satya Nadella18:53

When it comes to Xbox we are making the necessary decisions required across our content portfolio platform and operations to reset the business for long term growth.

Satya Nadella19:16

We have the best IP in the industry and talented studios around the world and believe we can bring these strengths together and expect to return the business to growth in fiscal 2027. In Windows, we are investing to ensure that it has the best quality and fundamentals while also ensuring it's the best place to run secure edge AI.

Satya Nadella19:24

We see significant opportunity for Windows to become the offload for unmet intelligence combining powerful on device

Satya Nadella19:27

Compute with enterprise grade security.

Satya Nadella19:41

In search and advertising Bing and Edge have both taken share for five straight years. And LinkedIn continues to see strong engagement across the platform with double digit member growth for the fifth consecutive year.

Satya Nadella19:49

Recruiters at over 20,000 companies are now using our AI powered solutions to reduce time to hire and improve candidate matching.

Satya Nadella20:04

Seats increased 140% quarter over quarter. In closing, I'm energized by the opportunities ahead. I've never been more confident in Microsoft's opportunity to drive durable long-term growth and ensure the benefits of AI flow broadly.

Satya Nadella20:08

With that, let me turn it over to Amy to walk through our financial results and outlook.

Amy Hood20:24

Thank you, Satya, and good afternoon, everyone. This fiscal year, we delivered over $331 billion in revenue, with growth accelerating to 18%, driven by strong demand across both the Azure platform and our first party AI applications and services.

Amy Hood20:37

Operating income growth outpaced revenue growth increasing 21% to more than 155 billion dollars as we invested in long-term growth while continuing to expand operating leverage.

Amy Hood20:55

This quarter revenue was 90 billion dollars up 18% and 17% in constant currency gross margin dollars increased 15% and operating income increased 18% earnings per share was 4.74 and increase of 23% when adjusted for the impact from our investment in open AI.

Amy Hood21:10

And FX was roughly in line with guidance. Several discrete items impact our financial results in the quarter, when compared to our forward looking guidance provided on our April earnings call, resulting in a benefit of 27 cents on diluted earnings per share.

Amy Hood21:22

These included a 3.2 billion dollar gain from our investment in Anthropic and lower than expected expenses related to the voluntary retirement program, which were partially offset by severance expense and impairment charges in Xbox.

Amy Hood21:31

When adjusting for these items, we exceeded expectations across revenue, operating income, and earnings per share due to strong demand and execution in the quarter.

Amy Hood21:41

Company gross margin percentage was 67% down year over year driven by sales mix shift to Azure as well as continued investments in AI infrastructure and growing product usage.

Amy Hood21:47

Partially offset by ongoing efficiency gains particularly in Azure and MC365 commercial cloud.

Amy Hood21:57

Operating expenses increased 10% driven by continued investment in R&D compute capacity talent and data to support product development across the portfolio.

Amy Hood22:04

G&A growth was impacted by a low prior year comparable as well as some of the discrete items mentioned earlier.

Amy Hood22:21

Operating margins increased slightly year over year to 45%. Total company headcount declined 2% year over year. When adjusted for the impact of our investments in OpenAI, other income and expense was $2.8 billion driven by the gain on investment in Anthropic, noted earlier.

Amy Hood22:27

Capital expenditures were $41 billion including the impact from higher component pricing as noted in our guide.

Amy Hood22:40

Roughly two thirds of our capex was for short lived assets primarily CPUs and GPUs as customers increasingly build solutions that leverage both AI and non-AI infrastructure.

Amy Hood22:42

The remaining spend was for long lived assets.

Amy Hood22:52

This quarter total finance leases were 5.6 billion dollars and were primarily for large data center sites. and cash paid for PP&E was 35.8 billion dollars.

Amy Hood23:03

Cash flow from operations was 55.4 billion dollars up 30% driven by strong cloud billings and collections partially offset by an increase in operating lease payments.

Amy Hood23:09

And free cash flow was 19.6 billion dollars reflecting higher capital expenditures.

Amy Hood23:21

And finally we returned 10.2 billion dollars to shareholders through dividends and share repurchases bringing our total cash return to shareholders to over 43 billion dollars for the full fiscal year.

Amy Hood23:43

Now to our commercial results commercial bookings grew 18% when excluding the impact from OpenAI driven by strong execution in our core annuity sales motions and reflecting broad customer demand across geographies and customer segments bookings increased 10% and 11% in constant currency when including Azure commitments from OpenAI.

Amy Hood23:56

Commercial remaining performance obligation grew 84% to 678 billion dollars all sequential commercial RPO growth was driven by commitments from customers outside of frontier model companies.

Amy Hood24:37

And RPO increased 25% when excluding OpenAI. RPO including OpenAI has a weighted average duration of 2.3 years and roughly 30% will be recognized in revenue in the next 12 months up 37% year over year the remaining portion recognized beyond the next 12 months increased 112%. Microsoft cloud revenue was 59.3 billion dollars and grew 27% reflecting strong demand across Azure and our first party AI applications and services and for the full year our cloud revenue surpassed 214 billion dollars with nearly 90% from customers outside of frontier model companies.

Amy Hood24:52

Microsoft cloud gross margin percentage was better than expected at 65% and down year over year driven by sales mix shift to Azure as well as continued investments in AI infrastructure and increased product usage partially offset by ongoing efficiency gains noted earlier.

Amy Hood24:55

Now to our segment results.

Amy Hood25:10

Revenue from productivity and business processes was 37.8 billion dollars and grew 14%. M365 commercial cloud revenue increased 16% on adjusted basis when normalized for the prior year comparable that benefited from two points of in period revenue recognition.

Amy Hood25:54

And on a reported basis revenue growth was 14%. building on our Copilot momentum from Q3, net paid seat ads more than doubled sequentially with paid seats now over 30 million premium offerings including Copilot E5 and early traction in E7 drove RPO growth this quarter and paid M365 commercial seats grew 6% year over year with installed base expansion across all customer segments though primarily in our small and medium business and frontline worker offerings. M365 commercial products revenue increased 19% ahead of expectations driven by large long duration M365 contracts that resulted in higher in period revenue recognition from the Windows commercial on premises component.

Amy Hood26:01

M365 consumer cloud revenue increased 24% and 22% in constant currency again driven by ARPU growth.

Amy Hood26:11

And M365 consumer subscriptions grew 7%. LinkedIn revenue increased 12% and 10% in constant currency primarily driven by marketing solutions.

Amy Hood26:24

Dynamics 365 revenue increased 13% and 12% in constant currency against a strong prior year comparable bookings growth at ERP remains healthy by CRM continued to moderate with longer sales cycles.

Amy Hood26:33

Segment gross margin dollars increased 14% and 13% in constant currency and gross margin percentage decreased slightly with increased M365 Copilot usage as we continue to invest

Amy Hood26:37

In product quality and drive further efficiency gains.

Amy Hood26:51

Operating expenses increased 11% primarily driven by the shared R&D investments mentioned earlier. Operating income increased 15% and 14% in constant currency and operating margins increased year over year to 58%.

Amy Hood26:54

Next, the intelligent cloud segment.

Amy Hood27:06

Revenue was 39.3 billion dollars and grew 32% and 31% in constant currency. And Azure and other cloud services revenue grew 43% against a prior year that included accelerating growth.

Amy Hood27:10

Customer demand continues to exceed available capacity.

Amy Hood27:21

Revenue growth was ahead of expectations driven by efficiency gains across our CPU and GPU fleet as well as process improvements to enable earlier delivery of new capacity.

Amy Hood27:35

That additional in-quarter capacity for Azure was quickly monetized. Results also benefited from stronger than expected GitHub Copilot consumption following the June business model change to align pricing with usage and value.

Amy Hood27:48

In our on-premises server business, revenue was relatively unchanged year over year and was down 1% in constant currency. Results were ahead of expectations primarily driven by renewals with higher in period revenue recognition from the mix of contracts.

Amy Hood28:00

Segment gross margin dollars increased 24% and gross margin percentage decreased year over year primarily driven by sales mix shift to Azure as well as the continued scaling of our AI infrastructure ahead of growing demand.

Amy Hood28:03

Partially offset by ongoing efficiency gains in Azure.

Amy Hood28:12

Segment gross margins were also impacted by growing GitHub Copilot usage though margins improved through the quarter with the June business model change to usage based pricing.

Amy Hood28:17

Operating expenses increased 10% driven by shared R&D investments noted earlier.

Amy Hood28:30

Operating income grew 31% and operating margins with a strong focus on efficiencies and investment returns were relatively unchanged year over year at 41%. Now to more personal computing.

Amy Hood28:46

Revenue was 12.9 billion dollars and declined 4% and 5% in constant currency. Windows OEM and devices revenue decreased 7% and Windows OEM decreased 5% driven by lower PC market demand and a high prior year comparable that benefited from Windows 10 end of support.

Amy Hood28:53

Results were ahead of expectations as OEM and channel partners continued to build inventory given increasing component prices.

Amy Hood29:05

Search advertising revenue ex-TAC increased 10% and 9% in constant currency with growth driven by higher revenue per search across Edge and Bing as well as higher volume the growth was impacted by third party partnerships.

Amy Hood29:18

And in Xbox revenue decreased 10% and 11% in constant currency Xbox content and services revenue decreased 10% against a prior year comparable that benefited from strong first party content performance.

Amy Hood29:27

Segment gross margin dollars decreased 2% and gross margin percentage increased year over year driven by lower amortization from the Activision acquisition.

Amy Hood29:36

Operating expenses increased 8% and 7% in constant currency driven by the continued investments in shared R&D noted earlier as well as impairment charges in Xbox.

Amy Hood29:58

Operating income decreased 14% and 15% in constant currency and operating margins decreased year over year to 21%. Now before I move to outlook effective at the start of FY27 we are extending the estimated useful life of our data centers and office buildings from 15 to 25 years reflecting our operating history

Amy Hood30:13

And expected use of these assets. The impact of this update is reflected in today's guidance. This change affects only the timing of future depreciation and is expected to have a minimal benefit to FY27 operating income.

Amy Hood30:28

The greater impact is on capital expenditures as more of our future data center leases will shift from finance leases to operating leases as a result of this update. Finance leases are included in capital expenditures while operating leases are not.

Amy Hood30:36

Outside of this useful life impact our calendar year 2026 capex investment expectations remain unchanged.

Amy Hood30:45

However the shift from finance to operating leases adjust our expectation to approximately 175 billion dollars.

Amy Hood30:46

Now moving to our outlook.

Amy Hood31:05

Let me start with some full year commentary for FY27. First some reminders. In both M365 commercial products and server products KPIs we are lapping higher transactional purchasing from the timing of product launches and expect revenue from both to decline in the mid single digits for the full fiscal year.

Amy Hood31:19

Growth in Windows OEM and devices will be impacted by lower PC market demand as higher component costs increase device pricing a prior year comparable that benefited from Windows 10 end of support and elevated inventory levels.

Amy Hood31:35

As a result we expect revenue to decline in the high teens for the fiscal year. Moving to FX. Assuming current rates remain stable we now expect FX to decrease full year fiscal revenue growth by less than one point with no meaningful impact to COGS and operating expense growth.

Amy Hood31:59

At the company level with strong commercial momentum we continue to expect another fiscal year of double digit revenue and operating income growth. Operating expenses should grow in the mid to high single digits reflecting continued investment in R&D compute capacity talent and data and we expect FY27 capital expenditures will grow year over year given demand signals across our portfolio.

Amy Hood33:39

Even as we invest to meet growing demand full fiscal year operating margins should be down less than a point in addition we expect to remain free cash flow positive in FY27 and finally we expect our FY27 effective tax rate to be approximately 20% now to the outlook for our first quarter which unless specifically noted otherwise is on a US dollar basis based on current rates we expect FX to decrease total revenue growth by less than one point with no meaningful impact to COGS or operating expense growth within the segments we expect FX to decrease revenue growth in productivity and business processes by roughly one point and intelligent cloud by less than one point there is no meaningful impact in more personal computing starting with our commercial business in commercial bookings when adjusted for the impact from OpenAI we expect healthy growth on a growing expiry base driven by strong execution across our core annuity sales motions as a reminder the significant OpenAI contract signed in the prior year will result in some quarterly volatility in both bookings and RPO growth rates Microsoft cloud gross margin percentage should be relatively stable quarter over quarter now to segment guidance In productivity and business processes we expect revenue of 36.7 to 37 billion US dollars or growth of 11 to 12% and M365 commercial cloud we expect growth of approximately 16% in constant currency on an adjusted basis which normalizes for the prior year comparable that benefited from one point of in period revenue recognition or 15% on a reported basis.

Amy Hood34:06

Sequential growth from our momentum in Copilot E5 and E7 is mitigated a bit by the lower ARPU new seat ads in frontline worker and small and medium business skews with the premium skew momentum and the increased monetization opportunity from adding usage based billing products alongside per seat licensing in July we expect to see acceleration in M365 commercial cloud revenue growth through this fiscal year.

Amy Hood34:33

M365 commercial product revenue should grow in the mid single digits driven by the timing of long duration M365 contracts partially offset by the impact from the prior year comparable noted earlier M365 consumer cloud revenue should grow in the mid teens down sequentially as we lap the benefit from last year's price increase growth will again be driven by ARPU and an increase in subscription volume For LinkedIn, we expect revenue growth in the high single digits.

Amy Hood34:46

And in Dynamics 365, we expect revenue growth to be in the low teens, relatively stable quarter over quarter driven by continued growth in ERP although impacted by the bookings trends noted earlier.

Amy Hood35:09

For intelligent cloud we expect revenue of 40.95 to 41.25 billion US dollars or growth of 33 to 34%. In Azure we expect revenue growth of approximately 45% in constant currency and we remain focused on delivering efficiencies that help us bridge the gaps we see as customer demand continues to exceed supply.

Amy Hood35:23

Even with the strong close to Q4 we continue to expect H1 growth to accelerate. And as a reminder year over year Azure growth rates can vary quarter to quarter based on capacity timing and contract mix.

Amy Hood35:33

In our on-premises server business we expect revenue to decline in the low to mid single digits with ongoing customer shift to cloud offerings and the prior year comparable noted earlier.

Amy Hood35:48

In more personal computing we expect revenue to be 12.2 to 12.7 billion US dollars as we continue to lap strong prior year comparables noted earlier and navigate complex PC market dynamics impacted by component prices and inventory levels.

Amy Hood35:54

Windows OEM and devices revenue should decline in the low 20s driven by the market dynamics noted earlier.

Amy Hood36:07

As in prior quarters the range of potential outcomes remains wider than normal. Search advertising revenue ex-tech growth should be in the mid single digits. Down sequentially due to the impact of third party partnerships.

Amy Hood36:12

Growth will continue to be driven by consistent trends in revenue per search and volume.

Amy Hood36:37

And in Xbox content and services we expect revenue to decline in the mid single digits hardware revenue should decline year over year. Therefore at the total company level revenue should be between 89.85 and 90.95 billion US dollars or growth of 16 to 17% with accelerating commercial growth partially offset by the impact from the PC market dynamics noted earlier.

Amy Hood37:55

We expect COGS of 29 point 6 to 29.8 billion US dollars or growth of 23 to 24% and operating expense of 16.8 to 16.9 billion US dollars or growth of 7 to 8% driven by continued investment in R&D compute capacity and talent operating margins should be relatively flat year over year excluding any impact from our investments in open AI other income and expense is expected to be roughly negative 100 million dollars as interest income will be more than offset by interest expense which includes the interest payments related to data center finance leases and we expect our Q1 effective tax rate to be approximately 20% next capital expenditures we expect capex spend will be over 50 billion dollars including the lease reclassification impact from the useful life update in closing in FY26 we delivered accelerating revenue and operating income growth while expanding operating margins our execution across sales and product engineering strengthened through the second half of the year as we begin FY27 we remain focused on delivering products that create meaningful return on investment for our customers which will result in durable long term growth for Microsoft and our shareholders with that let's go to Q&A Jonathan.

Jonathan Neilson38:11

Thanks Amy we'll now move over to Q&A out of respect for others on the call we request the participants please only ask one question operator can you please repeat your instructions

Operator38:29

Ladies and gentlemen, if you would like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad. And a confirmation tone will indicate your line is in the question queue. You may press star two if you would like to remove your question from the queue.

Operator38:39

For participants using speaker equipment, it may be necessary to pick up your handset before pressing the star keys. One moment please while we poll for questions.

Questions and answers

Operator38:44

And our first question comes from the line of Karl Keirstead with UBS. Please proceed.

Karl Keirstead38:59

Okay, great. Thank you, Satya. Maybe I'll start away from the numbers and ask if you could spend a minute and elaborate on your opening comments about model choice and the protection of corporate IP. Maybe I could ask this in two parts.

Karl Keirstead39:21

First, how material do you think traction could be for open and custom models over the next year or two knowing that many enterprises might be initially reticent to use open models and secondly how exactly does Microsoft benefit from this shift knowing that you've also got fairly large frontier lab exposure thanks so much

Satya Nadella40:09

Thank you Karl so the way we are coming at this is at the end of the day the goal is to have the firm be in control of their own destiny in terms of what I describe as building their human capital and their token capital, right? So at the end of the day, if a firm is a learning machine, they need their own learning machine and that's sort of really the goal and the models are an input not some extraction of the knowledge of the enterprise but in some sense you have to really at the end of the day every firm is going to evaluate who are the providers who are helping them with their outcomes and their knowledge creation.

Satya Nadella40:12

I think that that is now fairly clear and it's going to become clearer

Satya Nadella42:15

By the day this is not going to be about you know come in and take all my knowledge and benefit yourself whereas I am not getting anything out of it. So given that direction of travel we are very very clear about the architectural sort of design of the platform which is you got to keep your harness separate from the model when the harness will ensure that your memory your context um all of that is external that means any given model at any given time is swappable you should and you can use frontier models there's no reason not to but you also can use multiple of them right so if you look at some of the stats I gave it's a great example of how you use the frontier models for what they deliver how to use low cost models for what they deliver and in fact train your own model when you don't want to use any external model itself because after all you have all the outputs you have all the traces you have all the context that's really the enterprise design architecture that we are going to evangelize we ourselves are using it Copilot is built that way GitHub Copilot is built that way our security Copilot is built that way and we want to democratize that design pattern so that every enterprise can use it and within there will be a mix of open weights closed weights and by the way you know one of the things that's least talked about is remember right if you look even at the Hugging Face incident the biggest thing that we should take away from that is you can't sort of depend on any one model you will maybe need multiple models to even remediate some challenges that get caused by one model right that's the way to think about it right which is you can't be subject to the refusals of one model uh so there's a lot more design space here we talk about the frontier as if it's one thing the frontier is about every firm having a frontier and the choice the cost control and the capability that they need in order to be able to control their destiny.

Amy Hood42:51

And I think maybe Carl just to add a little bit to the end of your question which is that it's why it's important that the platform is built and I think Satya mentioned this in his comments to be able to deliver the right model for the right job on the architecture called Azure and so given that we continue to see growing demand no matter what model is chosen or what model family or whether it's run a model of your own the Azure platform is quite efficient at delivering that so think about that infrastructure as being pretty fungible.

Karl Keirstead42:53

Very helpful. Thanks.

Jonathan Neilson43:00

Thanks, Carl. Operator, next question, please.

Operator43:06

The next question comes from the line of Brent Thill with Jefferies. Please proceed.

Brent Thill43:34

Thanks Amy impressive acceleration in Azure up to 43 going to mid 40s I guess the questions around the underlying drivers what you and Satya are seeing in terms of just what's driving this and many of the questions around capacity constraints are we just still in the same environment or is this Microsoft just executing better given the constraints we're all seeing Thanks

Amy Hood43:44

Thanks, Brent. First, there are still constraints in the system. I think we've continued to say I think now for a number of quarters

Amy Hood43:57

That demand continues to exceed available supply. And that certainly remains true. You can even see it I think in some of the pricing that's occurring in the spot market for assets.

Amy Hood45:25

So when you think about being able to deliver better the first thing we focus on and I tried to talk a little bit about it in my prepared remarks is efficiency being able to get more out of everything that we've got in the fleet that applies to efficiency gains in the CPU fleet it's going to be efficiency gains in the GPU fleet we saw a good work this quarter in particular from our engineering teams to make as much of that available as we could and because of the supply demand imbalance we've been talking about when we can make efficiency gains they are quickly monetized in quarter and I think that dynamic certainly impacted the quarter positively um I would also say some of the process improvements we've made to make sure both CPUs and GPUs just the lead time from how quickly we can get things to simplify it tremendously plugged in was also improved over the past 90 days and so those improvements again are very quickly monetized when we're able to do that and at the scale that we're operating in terms of across the entire hyperscale fleet making efficiency improvements that can be quickly monetized does result in acceleration in the quarter It's part of also what we expect to see and talk about with the Q1.

Jonathan Neilson45:34

Thanks, Brent. Operator, next question, please.

Operator45:42

The next question comes from the line of Mark Moerdler with Bernstein Research. Please proceed.

Mark Moerdler46:05

Thank you very much for taking my question and congratulations on the solid really great quarter. Satya, Amy, sentiment around AI remains incredibly volatile with concerns about oversupply coming as well as concerns about component pricing increasing impacting margins.

Mark Moerdler46:35

Amy two related questions how does Microsoft protect itself if there really is over capacity and overbuilding of data centers overbuilding of chips etc and on the flip side of that how do you manage through the hardware price increases that we're seeing the component prices and that it doesn't just drive you to either massively drive up the price of your offerings or negatively impact your margins.

Amy Hood46:35

Thank you.

Amy Hood47:20

Um thanks Mark um the questions are a little bit related but I'll I'll start with maybe the first. you know currently um the situation is obviously that demand exceeds available supply in a sort of relatively extreme moment but when you start to think about over the duration I try to remind people you know a lot of the expense especially you see it in capex you've seen our capex really pivot toward what I would call and do call short-lived assets which really right that's CPUs and GPUs that have relatively shorter lead times and so if the demand

Amy Hood48:34

Environment changes you just slow down what is in fact the largest component right and the driver of COGS the investment into land and data center builds is actually quite flexible right it's a smaller percentage of the overall cost structure and it can be timing can be changed on much of that especially on the builds or you can stagger the timing of the build out of as I was saying some of the GPUs and CPUs that you plan to put in and so when you think about being able to manage through that hyperscalers have been doing that for quite a long time in terms of having the flexibility and the understanding of manage those changes in demand and the other thing is that's important Mark is you just have an incredibly diverse book of business by geo by segment by industry and I feel like when you look even at our backlog or what we added in RPO this quarter it is from the breadth of really the Microsoft product portfolio as well as our customer portfolio.

Amy Hood49:35

So when you have the ability to late bind some of the more expensive components in short term you have a big book of business that's flexible you have a big first party app business that also uses the capacity that you're building out in addition to your Azure platform it does allow us to have a lot more flexibility to manage through those um when it comes to the pricing question I think that's really impacting everybody equivalently in so many ways what we've been trying to do of course at this point is to just make sure that we're doing the best efficiency work we can so we can continue to give customers great value we're reminding people that frankly the cloud offers tremendous benefits versus having to make these purchases as servers on prem yourself or the price increases are even more hard for customers so the cloud still provides a great ROI in those types of situations.

Amy Hood49:55

And you know we're adding this capacity to your point but a lot of this obviously is also being sold in newer contracts and we're able to have the pricing reflect it but keep value where we you know listen for the long term you want to have pricing work for customers and for you and so we're trying to stay focused on that as well.

Satya Nadella51:21

And if I just add to Amy's comments I thought Amy captured it well you know all of us are reading this 1873 as the book to be read and so in my mind I think you've gotta get the product shape right that's sort of a lot of what we're focused on you have to get the portfolio right Amy talked about how what we're doing whether it's in Copilot or the super app bringing all the form factors or all the way to Azure and the agent first sort of primitives in Azure you kind of have to really get that portfolio to all come together the mix of customers is super important you have to recognize the breadth the geo mix the segment mix the workload mix and you gotta really think about all of those when you're even building capacity and then you gotta run an efficient railroad at the end of the day you do need to you know Amy talked a little bit about even in the last quarter how we've improved on the efficiency front it's not something that'll just show up at the end you have to sort of monotonically work at it and so we are very focused on all those um and then we know that there will be you know ups and downs of what is the cycle here but the secular shift is clear and we're very bullish about us coming uh with the right sort of mix of business and the right margin structure and most importantly with the right value for our customers.

Mark Moerdler51:25

Excellent. Thank you so much.

Jonathan Neilson51:30

Thanks, Mark. Operator, next question, please.

Operator51:37

The next question comes from the line of Adam Wood with Morgan Stanley. Please proceed.

Adam Wood51:50

Hi, good evening. Thanks for taking the question. Also congratulate on a very strong end to the year. Um I wanted to maybe just ask about N365 Copilot um obviously very strong quarter there with over 30 million paid seats and a strong acceleration.

Adam Wood52:12

Could you just talk a little bit about how you're seeing customers move from pilots to broader deployments here is this still a pilot driven motion or are we seeing a lot more broader deployments and then when we think about the monetization of products in terms of additional seats migration to higher value SKUs like E7 and consumption what you see as the main monetization or the main driver of monetization from here please thank you

Satya Nadella54:06

No, thank you, Adam, for that question. So let me start and then Amy can add. I think, yeah, it starts with, again, that product shape as you can see even within the quarter the product shape has changed pretty dramatically right so we now have chat, co-work, autopilot, code all coming to essentially what is going to become this flagship super app that various roles can use it and if you think about even the usage side that's a place where again lots of interesting data there right which is time to usage has you know drastically come down what used to be months is days right so when from when a license is bought to usage the usage intensity itself has gone up a significantly I mean we're talking about usage intensity that's sort of the same level of what is an everyday communication tool like Outlook or Teams the second thing I'd say is the overall enterprise wiring of this right so it's not like a tool that's isolated somewhere but it's wired in whether it is you brought up E7 right so it's wired into the governance pieces with Agent 365 so that you have your IT ops sec ops FinOps all wired in as well as it's all the business processes so for example your CRM system your ERP system all of them are just skills and plug-ins that go into co-work so you're able to take that enterprise wide work workflow and wire it into the super app right that increases usage so it all compounds and then the other one is the business model so we now have this per seat business model and so we also now have the usage business model so it's seat plus usage

Satya Nadella54:41

So we're already seeing um the you know the ARPU growth that comes from things like E7 but really as we deliver more value to customer and customer outcomes at the enterprise level in fact if I think about historically Office compared to what Copilot is is much more narrow this is the first time where you really have an enterprise wide tool which has a both per seat and usage based pricing so the TAM is much more expansive we're going to be very very focused on driving customer value and then expanding with it.

Amy Hood55:01

Yeah, Adam, and I think I talked a little about it in my prepared remarks, but I do think what we've been seeing is over the course of this year, some of the growth in ARPU was from E5 plus the Copilot license that Satya's talking about.

Amy Hood55:49

Little bit more from E7 really has a lot of interesting value in the Agent 365 component in particular, where Satya's talking about I mean, having SecOps and FinOps, think about in general everyone is going to need both observability of token spend and the manageability of token spend um for all business processes and that is what E7 brings and so uh I think that is it was only in market uh for a part of the quarter and I think we were quite encouraged um by the value customers saw in that skew uh I think we'll continue to focus on that through the year and then finally what Satya's talking about is this building TAM that grows through the year. And as I think about that expansive expanding TAM, that's really where we're talking about this usage and consumption growth.

Amy Hood56:03

And so as more of those experiences get wired in, and as IT gets more involved in that process, it'll be quite I think changing in terms of what people think of the M365 capabilities.

Satya Nadella56:49

It'll be fun for you, Adam. I think one of your colleagues put out an ROIC uh document. So I took that document to Copilot um which is a PDF and I said build me um a new sort of uh Power BI dashboard essentially but here is the thing it built a rich semantic model that went into my fabric with one lake that brought all the data in from the external sources in fact was current with all the SEC filings of all the Mag 7 um and then on top of that the repo itself is in GitHub uh but the artifact is sitting in my Copilot as a site that to me is a classic example of an enterprise wide workflow.

Satya Nadella57:12

I as a knowledge worker could go create a dashboard the data engineer can go to fabric and find the artifact the professional developer can go to the repo and find it in GitHub and by the way it's all registered with Agent 365 right that's a little bit of what Amy is describing as the coming together of a new way to work even while at the same time bringing IT security and manageability of it.

Unidentified speaker57:15

Very helpful. Thank you.

Unidentified speaker57:21

Thanks, Adam. Operator, next question, please.

Operator57:26

The next question comes from the line of Brad Zelnick with Deutsche Bank. Please proceed.

Brad Zelnick57:39

Great. Thank you so much for taking my question. Satya, appreciating cybersecurity is so core to everything Microsoft does. The playing field shifted recently with the latest frontier model releases and this week you introduced Project perception.

Brad Zelnick57:48

Can you expand on what this moment means for your cyber business explicitly and also what it means for trust in Microsoft more broadly thanks

Satya Nadella1:00:19

Yeah thank you for that question I think you're right about saying that the entire I would say the overall physics of how uh both um what is needed in terms of the fiber product and even the cyber operations um because at the end of the day you kind of have to sort of transform yourself on both the products but also how you operate as a company uh to protect yourself uh have changed pretty dramatically uh so what we are focused on is first again take the same approach we've taken for knowledge work or coding which is you gotta start uh with an intelligence first uh model forward approach and so what we launched with uh perception um is essentially saying let's sort of really make sure that you have the red team agents that know how to find you know constantly are red teaming and finding the vulnerabilities uh then you have the blue team agent that is constantly going and um uh making sure that you're triaging and the green team that fixes so you kind of create your own agentic system that's continuously operating uh to create the cyber defense you need it definitely feeds off of all the signals right whether it's the defenders it's identity intra signal the defender signal the network signal the app security signal all that sort of helping really do the context uh so that you can then uh truly create the protection the other thing they've also said is especially in cyber it becomes critical to have that multi-model approach to sort of the first question that was asked uh not just for cost in fact we proved with the MDash data in Cyber Gym that essentially you can have mythos level performance with 50% less cost because of this MAI cyber flash one and the reason is because 90% of the tasks are done by the cyber flash one model and 10% of the tasks you still go to the frontier right so this is sort of that mixing of the right model for the right task in what is essentially a pipeline job uh is a super important uh characteristic and so uh the to us I think this is an important piece oh and the other thing I'd say is from a resilience perspective right for whatever reason if a given model goes away uh then you kind of can't be left high and dry you need to be

Satya Nadella1:00:42

Able to still continue your cyber operations and that's the other piece so it's cost and resilience is both an important criteria and that's what we are trying to build in whether it's in code whether it's in cyber whether it is in knowledge work um and we're very very excited about uh perception and what it means quite frankly uh for our security business going forward.

Brad Zelnick1:00:45

Super helpful. Thank you.

Unidentified speaker1:00:50

Thanks, Brad. Operator, we have time for one last question.

Operator1:00:57

And the last question will come from the line of Gabriela Borges with Goldman Sachs. Please proceed.

Gabriela Borges1:01:12

Hey, good afternoon. Thank you. Amy, I wanted to ask you about ROI and you've given us color on the capex side of the equation. You've given us color on the monetization side of the equation. Maybe put those two pieces together for us.

Gabriela Borges1:01:26

When you look at and track ROI on the capex decisions you're making today, how does that compare to a year ago? and what are some of the levers that you can still pull perhaps on the internal side for example as a driver of incremental monetization going forward.

Amy Hood1:01:29

Thank you.

Amy Hood1:01:59

Um thanks Gabriela um you know I don't know that quite frankly my uh my math has changed uh in terms of how I do it uh over the past year I would say the way to think about it for me um is more the confidence in the TAM expansion the margin levers that we have in terms of both product improvements then the infrastructure improvements.

Amy Hood1:03:51

And we talked about some already on the call today in terms of the levers we have to continue to get efficiencies across both the application part of the stack and then the infra part of the stack. But um you're right we didn't touch on all of the pieces I think Satya actually commented on a number of them um we still have opportunities obviously as we continue uh to look for the best price performance on silicon including our investments in first party um the work frankly uh on model diversification also is a margin uh improvement opportunity being able to serve um the best possible outcome with a more efficient or both efficient in terms of token usage and efficient in terms of cost structure are also margin levers all of these things contribute obviously to your point of increased confidence in ROIC frankly of the dollars that we're investing um and continue to invest going forward and you know as we think about the mix of the portfolio being able to have a pretty broad pool across knowledge work coding security then basically the agent layer I'll call that Agent 365 it's kind of a cheat but all of that also is an opportunity and then of course what we talked about on the Azure side between model efficiency silicon and component efficiency including our investments in OneP solutions there and just the overall efficiency of running it at a hyper scale so we have quite a few levers to continue to see improvement that we're focused on but as Satya mentioned this is the grind work this is like every day you just get a little better and we actually are quite good at that grind and making sure that we can deliver that for customers.

Gabriela Borges1:03:56

That all makes sense. Thank you.

Jonathan Neilson1:04:03

Thanks, Gabriela. That wraps up the Q&A portion of today's earnings call. Thank you for joining us today and we look forward to speaking with all of you soon.

Amy Hood1:04:04

Thank you very much.

Satya Nadella1:04:06

Thank you.

Operator1:04:15

Ladies and gentlemen, this does conclude today's conference. You may disconnect your lines at this time. and enjoy the rest of your day.