While many Americans have been economically devastated by government’s overreaching response to the coronavirus outbreak, some companies, such as Microsoft, have benefited immensely.
The tech firm’s profits soared during the first quarter of 2021 as social-distancing requirements and lockdowns fueled demand for the company’s software and cloud-computing services.
According to a report released Tuesday, Microsoft’s profit during the first three months of the year was $14.8 billion, up 38 percent from the same period last year.
“Over a year into the pandemic, digital adoption curves aren’t slowing down. They’re accelerating, and it’s just the beginning,” CEO Satya Nadella said in a statement.
Moreover, the net income of $1.95 per share beat Wall Street expectations. Analysts had only expected Microsoft to earn $1.78 per share on revenue of $41 billion for the first quarter.
The software company’s total revenue for January-March was $41.7 billion, a 19-percent increase from last year.
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The Associated Press noted:
Revenue from Microsoft’s productivity segment, which includes its Office suite of workplace products such as email, grew by 15% over the same time last year, to $13.6 billion. Its cloud computing business segment grew 23% to $15.1 billion.…
But it’s the cloud growth that has been Microsoft’s focus as the company tries to tap into a pandemic-caused shift in big businesses, governments and other organizations doing more of their essential work online.
“Microsoft came through the pandemic with relatively little damage,” said Forrester research analyst Andrew Bartels.
In contrast to Microsoft’s good fortunes amid COVID-19, some 22 million Americans lost their jobs because of state and local governments that forced businesses to close their doors and citizens to stay at home.
Microsoft was founded by Bill Gates. While he stepped down as CEO of the company years ago and sold much of his stock in the company, he still retains a healthy 1.4 percent of the stock’s shares .
Gates, an avid proponent of vaccines and population control, played a very active role in the “pandemic.”
In October 2019, before the outbreak gripped the world, the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, in partnership with the World Economic Forum and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, held a pandemic simulation known as Event 201. A deputy director of the CDC and the chief of China’s CDC also participated in this “simulation” that bore a striking resemblance to the COVID-19 pandemic.
In April of last year, Gates claimed on his blog that the idea of using drugs to treat COVID-19 was unrealistic and said that the only way to “go back to the way things were” will be to make sure that “almost every person on the planet has been vaccinated against coronavirus.”
“Humankind has never had a more urgent task than creating broad immunity for coronavirus,” he claimed, adding that it should be given to newborns. “Realistically, if we’re going to return to normal, we need to develop a safe, effective vaccine. We need to make billions of doses, we need to get them out to every part of the world, and we need all of this to happen as quickly as possible.”
Moreover, the White House last year signed a $1.5 billion vaccine deal with Moderna, which has received millions of dollars in grant funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Microsoft, Gates’ creation, is currently on track to gain a foothold in increasingly important industries, such as artificial intelligence (AI), social media, and messaging. The company recently announced that it would buy Nuance Communications, a software enterprise that uses AI to facilitate speech recognition. Microsoft will make the purchase in an all-cash transaction valued at $19.7 billion.
Microsoft is also reportedly in advanced talks to purchase Discord, a video-game chat community with capability for voice and video that has increasingly become a popular way for individuals and groups to communicate with one another.
If Microsoft bought Discord, it could viably compete against other Big Tech firms in the messaging market, such as Facebook, which owns Messenger, WhatsApp, and Instagram. It would also allow it to tap into a large community and thus have the type of user-facing platform that firms such as Amazon and social-media platforms currently enjoy.
All of this is facilitated by the massive profits the “pandemic” has brought to Microsoft — profits that came at the expense of working Americans.
It couldn’t have worked out any better for Microsoft, or Bill Gates, if it had been planned that way.
