Microsoft 2015 Annual Report Download - page 2

Download and view the complete annual report

Please find page 2 of the 2015 Microsoft annual report below. You can navigate through the pages in the report by either clicking on the pages listed below, or by using the keyword search tool below to find specific information within the annual report.

Page out of 89

  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5
  • 6
  • 7
  • 8
  • 9
  • 10
  • 11
  • 12
  • 13
  • 14
  • 15
  • 16
  • 17
  • 18
  • 19
  • 20
  • 21
  • 22
  • 23
  • 24
  • 25
  • 26
  • 27
  • 28
  • 29
  • 30
  • 31
  • 32
  • 33
  • 34
  • 35
  • 36
  • 37
  • 38
  • 39
  • 40
  • 41
  • 42
  • 43
  • 44
  • 45
  • 46
  • 47
  • 48
  • 49
  • 50
  • 51
  • 52
  • 53
  • 54
  • 55
  • 56
  • 57
  • 58
  • 59
  • 60
  • 61
  • 62
  • 63
  • 64
  • 65
  • 66
  • 67
  • 68
  • 69
  • 70
  • 71
  • 72
  • 73
  • 74
  • 75
  • 76
  • 77
  • 78
  • 79
  • 80
  • 81
  • 82
  • 83
  • 84
  • 85
  • 86
  • 87
  • 88
  • 89

1
Dear shareholders, customers, partners and colleagues:
It’s been a remarkable year for all of us at Microsoft, a year of change and opportunity for our company, our industry
and the world.
We as a company stand for deeply understanding the needs of customers, translating that understanding into
products that people love and ultimately into the success our customers have with our products. It’s that last part that
is our key motivation. The entire Microsoft team is inspired to bring their best ideas and efforts every day to build
products people love, and to advance our mission to empower every person and every organization on the
planet to achieve more. And we’re seeing the impact.
We sharpened our focus this past fiscal year, prioritizing our talent and investments in areas where we have
differentiation and potential for growth. We executed with financial discipline, with revenue of $93.6 billion, $60.5
billion of gross margin, $18.2 billion in operating income and $12.2 billion in net income. And we significantly
increased our total cash return to shareholders by nearly 50 percent to $23.3 billion.
We also made key decisions that are moving us forward as the company that builds best-in-class platforms and
productivity services for our mobile-first, cloud-first world.
• We launched Windows 10 as a service that unites your experience across a wide range of devices with
innovations that increase productivity and flexibility while remaining familiar.
• Surface is proving that consumers and businesses alike want a tablet that can replace their laptop. We
achieved $3.6 billion in Surface revenue – equally gratifying is the fact that Surface won fans while also
creating a new hardware category.
• We restructured our phone business, as we aligned our first-party hardware portfolio into the larger
Windows ecosystem. Going forward we will focus on building premium, flagship phones for Windows fans
and commercial customers.
• We delivered Office everywhere on all devices, and Office 365 consumer subscriptions grew to more than
15 million, adding nearly 10 million subscribers in the fiscal year. Commercial customers are rapidly
adopting this service with seats growing by 74 percent.
• Azure cloud platform revenue and compute usage increased by over 100 percent in the fourth quarter
year over year.
• We are gaining ground in business process applications with triple-digit growth of the Dynamics CRM
Online installed base and the overall Dynamics business growing revenue by double digits.
• We delivered innovative new cloud services at an increasing pace spanning enterprise mobility, big data,
cloud infrastructure and application developer services.
In this year’s letter, I want to look forward and paint a picture of how we’re building on this momentum while also
reflecting on what we’ve learned.