GoKawiilMicrosoft is set to report fiscal third-quarter results after the close of regular trading on Wednesday.
Here's what analysts are looking for, according to LSEG:
Earnings per share: $4.06 adjusted
$4.06 adjusted Revenue: $81.39 billion
Microsoft's stock is coming off its worst quarter since 2008, due in part to broader market concern that artificial intelligence will eat software, and fears specific to the company that its hefty AI investments won't produce the desired results.
Still, Microsoft continues to show consistent growth, and is expected to report a revenue increase of 16% in the period ended March 31, from $70.1 billion in the same quarter a year earlier.
Microsoft has been baking its Copilot technology into its suite of productivity apps, in addition to offering access to the major AI models via its Azure cloud infrastructure. With Copilot, the company is trying to get businesses to pay a premium for AI-assisted services in an increasingly competitive market, where Anthropic, OpenAI and Google are all playing.
On Monday, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella touted the "largest deployment to date" of the company's 365 Copilot commercial AI add-on for productivity software subscriptions, after Accenture agreed to buy licenses for 740,000 employees.
"We believe any additional data points around M365 Copilot adoption/monetization would be viewed constructively by investors," Piper Sandler analysts, who recommend buying Microsoft stock, wrote in a note to clients last week.
Investors will be particularly focused on any commentary around data center spending. Along with its hyperscaler peers, Microsoft is pouring money into AI chips and systems to keep up with soaring demand for compute access so companies can build and access AI models and services. Analysts predict $34.9 billion in capital expenditures and assets acquired with finance leases, which would be up 63% from the prior year.
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