Microsoft Returns Billions to Shareholders

Despite current market volatility, Microsoft (MSFT -3.68%) continues to shine and grow at impressive rates. In this clip from "3 Minute Stocks Updates" on Motley Fool Live, recorded on May 11, Motley Fool contributor Toby Bordelon discusses the tech giant's quarterly performance.

Toby Berdelon: Microsoft is one of these companies that had a good quarter. They grew and yet the stock is still off just because that's where we are right now. That's the environment we find ourselves in. Let's take a look. These slides come from Microsoft. I love what they do. They post their presentation in PowerPoint, not in PDF. They give you their financial results in Excel. They provide you almost as soon as the call is done, or very quickly after, a transcript of the conference call in Word. They are using all their stuff to get information to their shareholders, which makes it nice to work with. You see revenue heading up. Revenue increased. Total revenue, 18%, led by the Intelligent Cloud, which is mainly the Azure business. This guy is a nearly $2 trillion company that continues to grow revenue at double-digit rates. Very, very impressive there. You look at those gross margins coming in, holding steady at 68% there for that gross margin, which is really, really solid with that. Operating income actually going up a little bit higher than revenue, which I love to see. Holding those expenses down quite a bit as they continue to grow. These gave us some financial highlights here. The cash flow is impressive, $25.4 billion in operating cash flow, which is an increase of 14% year-over-year. Very, very impressive with that. They are returning cash to shareholders in a really big way here, $7.8 billion in share repurchases with that $4.6 billion in dividends as you've got. In addition to that, they are still investing money there. They invested, what was it? I think something like $6.3 billion this quarter just to grow the Cloud business. They have enough cash flows to invest billions in their business while returning billions to shareholders. That is great. You can take a quick look here, some quick business highlights. The one that jumped out at me here is LinkedIn somehow growing at 34% in revenue year-over-year, which is not maybe what we expected when we originally did that acquisition, but it seems to be working out. The more personal computing space is probably the Laggard, I would say. We're still seeing growth there and it's in Intelligent Cloud with Azure, really getting it done. Azure and Cloud service is up 49% year-over-year, so really, really solid with that.