After the bell, Microsoft announced its fiscal Q4 2021 earnings. This period corresponds to the second quarter of the year. Microsoft reported revenues of $46.2 million and net income of $16.5billion. Earnings per share were $2.17. The company's revenues increased by 21% over the previous quarter and its net income increased by 47%.Yahoo Finance reported that the company's earnings beat expectations with revenues of $44.1 million and earnings per share at $1.90. The news caused shares of the software company to fall. This could be due to missing whisper numbers. Microsoft's recent trading at or close-to all-time highs puts the current 3% drop in after-hours trading into perspective. Today's regular trading session saw tech shares fall a lot, with Microsoft losing just under 1%.Microsoft is such a large company that it's difficult to see its top-level results. Let's dig deeper.Azure, Microsofts cloud computing platform, saw 51% revenue growth in its quarter compared with the previous year-ago quarter. This figure would drop to 45% if currency fluctuations were removed, according to the company. Based on initial analysis, the 51% figure is the best Azure growth result for the company since the fiscal Q3 2020 quarter or the first calendar quarter last year.This perspective makes it difficult to fault Azure's growth in the past three months.We can compare the results of other divisions to determine the following:Intelligent Cloud: 30% Growth, partly driven by Azures growthProductivity and Business Processes: 21% Growth, led by LinkedIn (46% and Dynamics 365 CRM (49% respectively).More Personal Computing: 9% Growth, led by search growth (53%), excluding traffic acquisition costsIt is easy to identify the weak spots in the larger Redmond revenue analysis. Office Consumer revenue increased by 18%, which is a modest figure. Windows OEM revenue declined by 3% and Surface revenue dropped 20%.These lowlights did not stop the company's overall growth and its titanic profitability. How profitable is Satya Nadella's company? In its last quarter, Microsoft spent $10.4 million on dividends and share buybacks. This is a confusing amount of money. We were also a little confused as to why Microsoft was buying back shares. The company's market capitalization stands at a little over $2 trillion. This means that it can at best slowly chip away at its share count over the long term at great expense. There must be a better way to spend its cash.However, the results of the company show that we are not far behind the trend of large technology companies posting lucrative and impressive results. This may increase investor confidence in technology companies. This, as you all know, is a good thing for startups.
