Microsoft's current and projected growth for its cloud computing business. (Photo : Twitter)
Microsoft's cloud computing business is showing great promise after posting significant growth in the first half of the year.
Company CEO Satya Nadella said that their Azure cloud computing service registered more than 200 percent increase in sales in the second quarter of 2016 compared to the same period in 2015, the China Daily reported.
While Nadella did not reveal the exact revenue earned by Azure, he said that the company's Intelligent Cloud division, to which the Azure platform is a part of, posted a total revenue of $6.7 billion. The figure is an increase of 7 percent from 2015.
The increase in sales of Microsoft's cloud computing division contributed to the company's overall sales increasing by 2 percent to $22.6 billion. Furthermore, the trend helped push stock prices up by 15 percent. Microsoft was trading 4 percent higher on Tuesday after the earnings report was released.
Nadella said that the success of the Azure platform can be attributed to its ability to run a variety of different applications on both public cloud and a corporate data center. He also said that having cloud data centers in both China and Germany also helped in expanding the coverage of their cloud services, Fortune reported.
The CEO then said that the growth of the cloud computing division helped them find new revenue sources despite the slowdown of PC sales. According to the report, the revenue generated from its Personal Computing section has fallen by 4 percent. The decrease was attributed to the decline in smartphone sales, plummeting to $20.6 billion.
However, Microsoft's productivity software division remained strong, with its Office 365 sales growing by 45 percent this year.
