Microsoft handily topped fourth quarter expectations as its commercial cloud revenue was $6.9 billion, up 53 percent from a year ago.

Like recent quarters, Microsoft's results [1]highlighted a company firing on all cylinders. The company reported fourth quarter net income of $8.9 billion, or $1.14 a share, on revenue of $30.1 billion, up 17 percent from a year ago. Non-GAAP earnings in the quarter were $1.13 a share.

Wall Street was looking for fourth quarter earnings of $1.08 a share on revenue of $29.2 billion.

CEO Satya Nadella said the company's investments in cloud and edge computing were paying off as Microsoft topped $100 billion in revenue for the year. Microsoft also recently acquired GitHub. [2]

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Perhaps the most surprising thing about Microsoft's quarter is that it didn't call out its commercial cloud run rate, which is now more than $27 billion. Azure revenue was up 89 percent from a year ago in the fourth quarter.

Here's the commercial cloud look:

msft-commercial-cloud-q4.png

By unit, Microsoft's productivity and business processes division had fourth quarter revenue of $9.7 billion, up 13 percent from a year ago. Office commercial products and cloud services revenue was up 10 percent with consumer Office up 8 percent.

Microsoft ended the fourth quarter with 31.4 million Office 365 consumer subscribers. LinkedIn revenue was up 47 percent. And Dynamics products and services sales were up 11 percent.

What is Microsoft 365? Microsoft's

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