Microsoft’s revenue, earnings drop

SEATTLE – Microsoft Corp. said Thursday its quarterly revenue fell from the previous year for the first time in its 23-year history as a public company, while its profit dived 32 percent.

The shortfall illustrated the toll the recession has taken on the world’s largest software maker, even though Microsoft remains one of the richest and most profitable companies. In January, Microsoft said it needed to resort to its first mass layoffs, cutting 5,000 jobs, and on Thursday it announced it would do away with merit pay increases for employees in the next fiscal year.

Microsoft did not issue earnings guidance for the rest of the year, and it offered no hope for a rebound in the current quarter.

“I didn’t see any improvement at the end of the quarter that gives me encouragement that we’re at the bottom and coming out of it,” said Chris Liddell, Microsoft’s chief financial officer.

Even so, Microsoft shares gained 2.6 percent in extended trading after the earnings report, having closed earlier at $18.92, up 14 cents.

Redmond-based Microsoft said that in its fiscal third quarter, which ended March 31, profit was $2.98 billion, or 33 cents per share. In the same quarter of 2008, Microsoft earned $4.39 billion, or 47 cents per share.

Microsoft’s results included a $290 million charge for severance from some of the layoffs announced in January. The software maker also wrote down $420 million related to investments that lost value.

Excluding such items, Microsoft said it would have earned 39 cents per share, matching the estimate of analysts surveyed by Thomson Reuters.

Microsoft avoided a steeper drop in profit by slashing costs in several areas, such as sales and marketing, which it cut by 9 percent to $3 billion.

Revenue in the last quarter slipped 6 percent to $13.6 billion, missing analysts’ expectations for $14.1 billion.

“I think it was a good quarter in a tough environment,” said Taunya Sell, an analyst for Ragen MacKenzie, a division of Wells Fargo. They did “the two things you can do in a tough environment – try to keep costs down, and make sure customers still want to buy your products.”

Microsoft makes most of its profit selling the Windows operating system and business software such as Office, and those divisions have been hammered over the last six months as consumers and businesses sharply cut their technology spending. The holiday quarter, which ended in December, was the PC industry’s worst in six years, according to research groups IDC and Gartner Inc. In the following quarter, computer shipments sank about 7 percent.

Even the brightest spot in the PC market – tiny, recession-friendly laptops known as netbooks – had a downside for Microsoft because those inexpensive computers run a cheaper version of Windows XP, Microsoft’s last-generation operating system.

The Windows division’s profit fell 19 percent to $2.5 billion, and its sales sank 16 percent to $3.4 billion in the last quarter.

The division that makes Office saw its profit drop 8 percent to $2.9 billion on revenue that declined 5 percent to $4.5 billion.

Both divisions were cushioned to some extent by businesses that renewed bulk software licenses at about the same pace as usual.

Microsoft’s online advertising business widened its quarterly loss, and its entertainment and devices division, which makes the Xbox 360 game console and the Zune media player, swung to a loss from the prior year.

Microsoft said the current quarter would probably still be weak in the markets for PCs and computer servers.