Microsoft India sales increased 39% in FY23 due to a jump in services

 Microsoft India sales increased 39% in FY23 due to a jump in services

According to a regulatory filing made on Thursday with the ministry of corporate affairs' registrar of companies, Microsoft Corp. India Pvt. Ltd., the organization in charge of selling and marketing Microsoft products in the nation, saw a 39% increase in operating revenue to 19,229 crore from the year prior.

Employee benefit costs jumped 16.5% to $1,411 crore over the course of the year, while net profit increased 30% to $649 crore.

According to Microsoft's financial papers, which Mint obtained via the business intelligence platform Tofler, the company's expansion in the nation has been mostly driven by an increase in income from its services products. From 8,951 crore a year earlier, service revenue increased by 46.4% to 13,103 crore.

A year ago, Microsoft's Surface range of consumer and business laptops and desktops brought in $3,519 million. This year, that number increased by 28% to $4,508 million.

Rising demand for the company's cloud platform Azure and its generative artificial intelligence (AI) services to businesses is the primary driver of the company's overall development in India. The majority of industry participants said that Microsoft, which is second to market leader Amazon Web Services (AWS), has around one-fifth of the Indian cloud services market via its Azure platform and services.

Microsoft Azure was estimated to have a 20.8% market share for cloud service providers in India by business intelligence platform Course5i at the end of the previous year.

Comparatively, Amazon Web Services had 32.6% of the Indian market, while Google Cloud Platform, which came in third, held a 11.4% share. Microsoft has been gaining recognition as a cloud service provider on a global scale as well.

According to a Bank of America market study for the end of 2022, the company's market share in the market for worldwide cloud service providers was 30%, coming in second behind AWS's 55% share.

A request for comments from a Microsoft representative in India received no response.

The company's use of the cloud in India has benefited from collaborations with Indian IT services providers. A strategic agreement between Microsoft and Infosys for the implementation of corporate clouds was extended in February. The firm is still in its infancy when it comes to generative AI; just this week, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), the biggest supplier of IT services in India, announced a collaboration with the company's Azure AI platform to assist increase its margin during a period of industry contraction.

The likes of Microsoft, Amazon, and Google are anticipated to profit from businesses prioritizing cloud investment even while discretionary tech adoption has remained hesitant. The chief executive and managing director of HCL Technologies, C. Vijayakumar, pointed out that cloud migration, data analytics, while cyber security "remain important priorities, and consumers (are) not cutting down in these essential areas" in an interview last week.

As a consequence, cloud service providers are intensifying their collaborations with the public and private sectors. On Thursday, Google, another major tech company, announced a collaboration with the Bhashini language data repository initiative, which is supported by the Centre, to provide datasets for application development on its cloud platform. In order to support farmer producer groups' direct access to consumer markets, the business also highlighted a generative AI relationship via its cloud platform with Centre-backed e-commerce protocol Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC).