Top 4 Cloud Tech Firms’ Revenue Shoots Up Amid COVID19

COVID-19 has affected lives and businesses in varied terms. To a greater extent, it slowed down everything but the silver lining comes for the market players who are providing services to run the businesses. These services include cloud technologies which enabled the remote work for organizations around the world and somehow flipped the entire model of running business.

With recent quarter earnings coming up, there are plenty of companies which made huge profits during the pandemic.

Microsoft Corp.

The biggest growth if any cloud tech company has seen during the pandemic times is Microsoft Corp. Microsoft’s cloud subsidiary Azure registered tremendous adoption rate soon after the companies went to “work from home”.

Microsoft Corp. today announced the following results for the quarter ended March 31, 2020, as compared to the corresponding period of last fiscal year:

• Revenue was $35.0 billion and increased 15%
• Operating income was $13.0 billion and increased 25%
• Net income was $10.8 billion and increased 22%
• Diluted earnings per share was $1.40 and increased 23%

“We’ve seen two years’ worth of digital transformation in two months. From remote teamwork and learning, to sales and customer service, to critical cloud infrastructure and security – we are working alongside customers every day to help them adapt and stay open for business in a world of remote everything,” said Satya Nadella, chief executive officer of Microsoft. “Our durable business model, diversified portfolio, and differentiated technology stack position us well for what’s ahead.”

Amazon Web Services

Amazon has continued its services in the U.S. regions whereas other ecommerce markets such as India, government-imposed bans on the courier services to control disease spread. These varied impositions still do not impact the revenue numbers for Amazon but dipped the profit margins. Amazon Web Services is proving to be crucial as usual and has registered good numbers.

Amazon’s Q1 earning break-up for its fiscal quarter of 2020:

• AWS up 33%
• Subscriptions up 28%
• ‘Other’ up 44%
• North American sales up 29%
• International sales up 18%
• $4.0 billion of costs related to COVID-19 for Q2 2020

Amazon Web Services (AWS) passed the $10 billion milestone in Q1 even as growth continues to slow down. AWS’ dip in growth below 40% started in Q2 2019 and since then the company has not registered growth greater than 40% milestone. But this does not mean that the it is not racking up profits. Meanwhile, the growth slipped to 35% in Q3 2019, 34% in Q4 2019, and now 33% in Q1 2020. It appears that COVID-19 has done little to change the trend.

Google Cloud (subsidiary of Alphabet)

Alphabet shared Q1 2020 earnings which appears to be a mix of gains and loss for the company. But as other cloud service providers are making the most of the opportunity; Google cloud also seems to be a shining armor in Alphabet’s balance sheets.

• Google Cloud revenue came to be $2.77 billion.
• Google ad revenues came to $33.76 billion, compared to $37.934 billion in Q4 2019.
• Google Search and other ad revenue (excluding YouTube) brought in $24.502 billion in Q1, down from $27.185 billion in Q4.
• Revenue for YouTube ads was down to $4.038 billion from $4.717 billion last quarter.

For Q1 2020, Google Cloud (which includes Google Cloud Platform and G Suite) made $2.77 billion which registered a growth of 52% from $1.825 billion Q1 2019. The numbers surpassed the last quarter earnings also which was $2.614 billion.

Citrix

Citrix registered 27% growth from last year.

Citrix’s Workspace Suite, which includes its server and desktop and application virtualization products XenApp, XenDesktop, and XenServer, along with XenMobile mobile-device management tools, ShareFile Enterprise file sync and sharing, and networking.

• Product and license revenues rose 28% year over year to $172.8 million.
• Support and services revenues declined 5% on a year-over-year basis to $418.9 million.
• Subscription revenues increased 89% from the year-ago period to $268.2 million.
• Networking revenues increased to $180 million, while networking subscription revenues climbed 131% from the year prior-year period. 

 The company said it saw a significant increase in Workspace deployments as more people were forced to work remotely and demanded a secure remote work infrastructure. Workspace revenue totaled $654 million, up 27% from a year ago, the company said.