A few days after the announcement that 10,000 jobs would be cut, the software company Microsoft presented its business results on Tuesday after the stock market closed.

He did show some weaknesses, but overall he was in solid shape and his gains continue to flow.

It reported a 12 percent drop in net income to $16.4 billion for the past quarter.

However, if one calculates the costs for the restructuring program that has just been announced, he would have even increased his profit slightly, at least on a currency-adjusted basis.

Earnings per share were slightly better than analysts had expected, and the share price rose about 4 percent at times in after-hours trading.

Roland Lindner

Business correspondent in New York.

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Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella described the job cuts last week as "difficult but necessary".

Customers have become more cautious and are trying to optimize their information technology spending "to do more with less".

The 10,000 jobs eliminated correspond to almost 5 percent of the workforce.

Microsoft has booked an expense of 1.2 billion dollars for the austerity program.

This is due to severance payments, but also unspecified changes in the "hardware portfolio" and costs for giving up rental contracts because the company is in the process of creating "higher density" in its offices.

Especially bad business with Windows there

Microsoft is far from the only tech company cutting jobs.

Last week, the Alphabet holding company around the Internet company Google announced that it would eliminate 12,000 jobs.

The online retailer Amazon and Facebook's parent company Meta had previously announced that a five-digit number of jobs would be cut.

Microsoft now reported revenue growth of 2 percent to $52.7 billion for the past three months.

That was slightly less than expected, and as a result, growth has slowed significantly compared to the previous quarter, when it was 11 percent.

Adjusted for currency effects, the situation would have been better in the most recent quarter, on this basis there would have been growth of 7 percent.

Business with Azure, Microsoft's platform for cloud computing, which analysts were particularly attentive to, weakened in the past quarter.

Here, sales increased by 31 percent this time, compared to 35 percent in the three months before.

Business with the Windows operating system for personal computers, once a flagship division of the group, is currently doing particularly poorly.

This time Microsoft reported a dramatic drop in sales of 39 percent, in the previous quarter the decline was still 15 percent.

The PC market has slowed significantly after rapid growth during the pandemic.

There was also a drop of 39 percent in the hardware business, which includes, for example, PCs from the in-house brand Surface.

Microsoft justified this with the continued weakness in the PC market and "challenges" when introducing new products.

However, Microsoft achieved significant growth in a number of other segments.

Nadella said last week that Microsoft intends to continue investing in "strategic future areas" despite the austerity measures it has taken.

It was only on Monday that the company announced that it intends to invest several billion dollars again in Open AI, the manufacturer of the ChatGPT software that works with artificial intelligence (AI), which is currently causing a sensation.