Microsoft's Strong Quarter

In this podcast, Motley Fool host Ricky Mulvey and analyst Nick Sciple discuss:

• Microsoft's quarter and focus on Copilot.
• If Bing can become more of a competitor to Google search.
• Alphabet's investments in self-driving technology.
• The antitrust suit hanging over Alphabet.

Motley Fool host Deidre Woollard interviews Vincent Stanley, Patagonia's director of philosophy, about companies that are doing work to help the planet.

To catch full episodes of all The Motley Fool's free podcasts, check out our podcast center. To get started investing, check out our quick-start guide to investing in stocks. A full transcript follows the video.

This video was recorded on Oct. 25, 2023

Ricky Mulvey: We've got more than four trillion dollars worth of companies to cover, so let's get started. You're listening to Motley Fool Money. I'm Ricky Mulvey. Joined today by Nick Sciple live from what appears to be an empty room. Nick, welcome to the show.

Nick Sciple: Great to be here with you Ricky. As you alluded to I'm getting ready to move next week, so my whole life is in boxes. There are disarray everywhere, but we'll try to remain clear headed here for this episode.

Ricky Mulvey: It's a stressful time. Someone who's not having, I would say a stressful morning though is Satya Nadella the CEO of Microsoft because if it's hard to accelerate a cruise ship don't tell this tech company they beat expectations. Growing revenue at a 13% clip to $50 billion just in this quarter. Before we dive into the details, what's your big take on it?

Nick Sciple: Just really how remarkable the growth story is for Microsoft you think about this is a company that's going to turn 50 years old in two years, still delivering the type of growth that it's putting out there into the market. You just laid out there the 13% revenue growth, net income up 27% in the quarter to over $20 billion in free cash flow buying back a net $4.2 billion in stock expenses growing at the slowest rate in seven years. A company that's getting ready to turn 50-years-old, you'd think it would be maturing. You think it might be slowing down a little bit; not the case for Microsoft and it doesn't look like that's going to be the case really anytime soon.

Ricky Mulvey: The key word I would say of this quarter was co-pilot. We heard about co-pilot applications a little bit more than Activision Blizzard or OpenAI, which is related to co pilot, but anyway basically they're focusing on these applications where they're going to make coding more efficient. They're going to transform productivity, so if you've ever sent an email and then seen the rest of the sentence written for you that's the co-pilot at work. Also looking to redefine search with Bing offering more contextual value when you make a search on that platform. If you make a search on that platform, why is this such a big focus for Microsoft at this moment? Do you think this push is going to be meaningful for its investors?

Nick Sciple: Yeah. I do think the push is going to be meaningful for investors. Why is Microsoft excited about it? Really Microsoft is a technology company and AI is positioned as the next revolution in technology. For that reason alone it's something that Microsoft should be excited about and getting behind, but more importantly if you think about Microsoft's core franchise going all the way back to its founding it's really been built on technology that enhances worker productivity. You think about things like Word, Excel, how they've really enhanced what workers are able to get done. Microsoft has been a leader in that space forever, and co-pilots really are the next wave of that type of productivity enhancing software; just to throw out a couple of stats for you; Github Co Pilot, which helps software developers write code. Microsoft threw out that has increased developer productivity by 55%. Technology investments like this have led the number of developers on Github to increase by 4x since Microsoft acquired the company five years ago. If you remember Steve Ballmer's famous quote from 810 years ago, at this point, developers, developers, developers really the key to winning for a business like this. On top of that, the productivity gains that Microsoft can deliver to its customers. Arguably, you are going to give the company some more pricing power which is great for any business out there. Starting November 1st, they're going to offer 365 Co Pilot AI as an add on for its existing productivity software subscriptions which is going to become available to large companies. That's going to be charging $30 per month per seat. That can add up to a really big number, if you think about the full scope of Microsoft's customer base. Really a new technology offering which is going to win a really key constituency when you think about developers and also offer the company the ability to increase price over time. All those things good for investors.

Ricky Mulvey: I think one of the big questions though is if this really makes Bing more competitive with the Google Search Engine. Right now I'm in the maybe camp because I think it would be enormously difficult to break the stickiness factor, but in preparing for this segment I made a couple of of the same searches on Google and Bing. If you're looking for where something is, Google, I think still has an advantage if you're looking for how to do something. Right now Bing might have some advantages because it can add that context with the ChatGPT.

Nick Sciple: We'll talk about the Google antitrust case maybe a little bit later. When you're getting sued for antitrust, it certainly says that going after that market is challenging for new competitors. I think for me as an investor more excited about that the enterprise facing offerings here for Microsoft AI than the consumer facing areas, but never say never when it comes to these new technology innovations what they can do when it comes to shaking up the current competitive landscape.

Ricky Mulvey: Well, the real thing investors are excited about at Microsoft is the Cloud which produced about 32 billion in revenue. This includes Azure and Github as you mentioned. Nick, I really don't have anything smart to say about this other than it seems like really big companies using Microsoft Cloud Platforms, but anything stand out to you about the Cloud performance here?

Nick Sciple: Well, the thing that's really jumping out to the market this morning is that it appears Microsoft is taking share in the Cloud market. The intelligent cloud business as a whole grew 19% in the quarter and Azure itself grew 28% in constant currency which was an acceleration from the previous quarter. Management expects the company to maintain that same level of growth; 26-27% growth, for the remainder of the year with increasing contributions from AI. AI contributed 3% to Azure growth in the quarter versus 2% expected to think about those big investments. Microsoft has made in OpenAI that's really leading to increased spending at the Cloud business. Those numbers are great, but really even better is when you put it in contact with competitors. We'll talk about Google a little bit later. They reported their Cloud business grew only 22% off a smaller base than Microsoft's Cloud business really suggests Microsoft is taking share in the cloud market. If you think about the nature of this business companies have to spend a lot of money, manpower, resources in order to move over to the Cloud. Once that happens, it tends to be pretty sticky so the share that Microsoft is taking today likely to still be there 35 years down the line.

Ricky Mulvey: One thing we haven't discussed that Nadella made a quick note of at the end, I think this was a great mic drop or the Act Division deal. That deal is done and Microsoft now has 13 franchises worth a billion dollars or more. Their library includes Call of Duty, Candy Crush, Gears of War, World of Warcraft. I'm not a big video game guy Nick. Even I know that those are huge. I want to position this with Google though. Let's say you're starting Nick Sciple's Mega Corp over there in Tennessee and you've got some money to work with. You can either take Microsoft's gaming division or YouTube. Which one are you taking?

Nick Sciple: Well, while the Microsoft Gaming division certainly has lots of attractive properties and it's a great business, I think I would take YouTube as between the two of them. If you think about Microsoft gaming, well position, but still has a distant second to Sony in console gaming. Also, if you think about the business structure of game development like lots of other forms of entertainment media, you have to create the entertainment content upfront spend all that money upfront with an uncertain payout there at the end depending on how many people end up buying the final product. You contrast that with YouTube which is by far the leader in its subsegment of user-generated video content. There's really not a Sony to YouTube in their space. Also, they pay nothing up front for content costs by utilizing user-generated content. You only pay folks on the back end based on how big of a hit takes place. A lot less risk there on the content generation side. If you look at the two business' similar growth profile, Microsoft gaming in the quarter which does not include Activision today because that activation transaction closed during the quarter put up about 12% growth. You're looking at a similar growth profile for YouTube. With a better market structure and a similar growth profile, I would prefer to have YouTube.

Ricky Mulvey: Let's take a deeper dive into Google though, because YouTube unfortunately isn't the big story for this tech giant this quarter. The business shed $100 billion in market value off what seems to be losing a little bit of ground to Microsoft in this cloud division. Still growing that business at a 22% clip. Nick if you look at that in isolation that's still pretty good, but we don't look at things in isolation. Is this just a cloud battle story and expectation story? What I'm I missing with this?

Nick Sciple: It seems to be mainly being driven by that gap between expectations and reality when it comes to the Cloud business. I mentioned those numbers earlier from Microsoft. You compare those with the 22% growth rate from Google, suggest that Google is losing ground. They are the third place competitor behind Microsoft and Amazon and it appears that they're going to continue to remain in third place. But if you look outside of that cloud business, overall results came in better than expectations. Revenue was up 11% driven by strong performance in the ad business. The core Google ad business was up 11%, YouTube ads were up 12%. As I mentioned earlier, operating income up 28% driven by reduced cost. Most notably, employee headcount down over 2% versus the prior year driven by layoffs. If you look at the top line and the earnings numbers really beat expectations, but it's really concerned about the long-term growth trajectory for the Google Cloud business whether they are going to be able to compete effectively with Microsoft and Amazon.

Ricky Mulvey: There's a few more developments though outside of this Cloud battle, which is that they took a little bit of a spotlight on and you take a pick from this menu of what Google talked about. Waymo has 100,000 people on its self drive waiting list. It's partnering with Walmart for drone deliveries in Dallas. The Cloud AI Platform, Duet AI, is partnering with retailers including Aritzia and Jim Shark to help them gain new insights for better and faster business results. It's also got a new pixel smartphone that is "the fastest growing smartphone brand" in our top markets. There's your menu. Take your pick. What stands out to you?

Nick Sciple: I'm excited to see what happens with Waymo. They're letting new riders onto the platform in San Francisco, preparing to launch in Austin as their next market. We've been waiting for self driving to become an actual market, driving real revenue for the longest time and maybe that's finally getting ready to take place. Other bets still losing which is the segment that includes Waymo still reporting a loss of almost 1.2 billion in the quarter. At some point, you'd like to see those other bets make money. If Waymo reaches commercialization, perhaps that's one of the areas where you'll see that. One of their big competitors stubbed their toe this week. Crews lost their approval from California's autonomous driving regulators in order to operate their vehicles without a driver in the car. Yeah, one of the big potential competitors in self driving having a tough time, while it appears Waymo is continuing to expand its offering. It would be nice to see as I said some real results from Waymo and that's an area I'll be watching.

Ricky Mulvey: Are you getting in a self driving car? Let's say you're in San Francisco. You can either get an Uber or you can get a Waymo self driving car. Price is the same. Which one are you getting into?

Nick Sciple: Whichever one gets there picks me up faster. If you think about the safety standard that a self-driving car company would have to have to have this thing operating on the road, I would argue that you're going to have to meet a little bit higher safety standard than maybe your average Uber driver out there on the road. Again, that's not necessarily true. Again, we just saw what happened with crews in California. You can look up the incident there. I think I would be willing to ride in the self-driving car, but I understand why other people might feel differently.

Ricky Mulvey: You can show me the data, but it still gives me a little bit of the spooks. I want to try it though. Anyway, there is a Cloud hanging over these Clouds, Nick and that is the antitrust suit hanging over Alphabet. The Justice Department says that, Google illegally crushed competition by paying companies like Apple, to make its search engine the default, making it tough for consumers to switch, even though you can, you're probably not going to do it. Google says these deals weren't exclusive and users could always change to their settings. Do you think this argument is enough to break up in a legit monopoly?

Nick Sciple: Well, that's for the courts to decide. We'll see how it plays out. I will withhold judgment on whether or not we've got monopolization here. But I think it is worth noting for the less legal savvy folks out here that having a monopoly isn't illegal, it's the practice of monopolization that is. To prove monopolization, you really have to prove two elements. One, the presence of monopoly power in your relevant market. Then two, is you have to have the willful acquisition or maintenance of that power as distinguished from growth based on having a superior product, business acumen or a historic accident. Think about your natural monopoly. You can say pretty definitively, that the market power, monopoly power element is there. Google has well over 70% market share, which is what many courts, if you looked at as your prima facie evidence of market power. However, the second element, a lot harder to prove. Courts are alleging that some of these default agreements, particularly with Apple, are anti-competitive. But you can make an argument that there are legitimate business reasons, why Apple might choose Google and why Google might seek these agreements that are outside of anticompetitive behavior.

It may come down to what prosecutors find in discovery, that goes to Google's intent behind reaching those agreements. You mentioned breaking up the monopoly, even if prosecutors win here, one question I have is, how do you remedy this? You could pay some damages out to your banks of the world and things like that. But this is a fundamental business service, that I don't know how you divide it. This is not an AT&T company, where you can divide the Northeast and the Northwest from one another. It's really an individualized service. I'm not sure how you could break it up to improve the market structure. You could say that maybe this calls for more regulation in the market, but that would entrench the monopoly even deeper. I'm not sure that the remedy that the court could create, to change the way the market is structured today. But that's not for me to decide, That's for those people in DC to figure out. Certainly, it going to be an interesting case.

Ricky Mulvey: One shilling dollar company paying money to another trillion-dollar company sounds like fun. Anyway, glad you don't have to decide this case, but you got to focus on your move. I'll let you get back to it. Nick Sciple, thank you for your time and your insight. 

Nick Sciple: Great to be here with you as always, Rick. 

Ricky Mulvey: In September of 2022, Patagonia made the Earth its only shareholder. Deidre Woollard talks with Vincent Stanley, Patagonia's director of philosophy, about that process. What corporate responsibility looks like today and some surprising companies doing good work for the plant. 

Deidre Woollard: I wanted to talk a little bit about the big news you had coming out last year, where you transferred ownership to the Patagonia Purpose Trust and the Holdfast Collective. Now that that's been in place for a while, how is the company adjusted? What does it meant for the company so far and have you seen interest from other companies about this type of structure?

Vincent Stanley: I think it's made surprisingly little difference within the company.

Deidre Woollard: Interesting.

Vincent Stanley: Except to make life less anxious. We have the owners of the company are older and so a transition was likely to be in the works. The younger Trinards were going to inherit the company and very much they grew up inside the company. They both work in the company and they're in accord with the scenario. That part of the transition would be fine. But I think just the symbolic power that we adopted in 2018 a new purpose statement saying we're in business to save our home planet. I think that was transformative in which it interested me, that I watched all the team leaders and people on the teams go. What does this mean for me? What does this mean for our work? How do we change the way we make products? How do we change our approach to the customer? I think that, that was a natural transition to saying, OK, now the only shareholder is the Earth and we're giving the company stock to a nonprofit. All of the profits that would have gone to shareholders, beyond reinvestment or beyond bonuses to employees, is now going to go to environmental causes. I think that put the structure of the company pretty much in line with its purpose and I think that's been successful. It hasn't affected the day to day work because Patagonia's company hasn't changed much. The government, it's the same board that we had at Patagonia's now board at the Purpose Trust. The internal changes are not remarkable.

Deidre Woollard: One of the things Patagonia is known for is repairing garments and you have repair on your checklist for responsible company behavior. We're seeing this right-to-repair movement, when it comes to everything from tractors to electronics, why is the ability to repair things so important?

Vincent Stanley: I think when you talk about sustainability, durability is so key. That you want a product for all of the energy that goes into it and all of the resources and all of the waste generated from the creation of a product. You want that product to last as long as possible, and that reduces its negative impact over the life of a product. If something less fast fashion clothes that are not made very well, because they're going to be thrown away after five uses versus a jacket or sweater that's going to last 10 years. You're prorating that environmental cost over time. But if it's not repairable, then you can't use it. For our business, particularly for outerwear, the biggest repair item is a zipper that will fail before the fabric does. If you make a jacket with a zipper that can't be replaced, the durability goes way down. Repairability is key for that reason. We didn't even have a repairability as a major design principle, until we started to really work on this idea of the four R's of making things reusable and repairable, as well as recyclable at the end of their life.

Deidre Woollard: Do you have the updated book, The Future of a Responsible Company? Has your idea of what it means to be responsible changed over time?

Vincent Stanley: No, I do think it has become more concentrated and I think there's a big difference between doing business now and a decade ago. That is that the environmental crisis in two ways. One in terms of climate change and also, the loss of biodiversity and thinning of the web of life and also the water crisis. We're just beginning to grapple with that New York Times ran a piece a couple of weeks ago on water withdrawals. This is really serious. We're losing water in the aquifers, and then a lot of rivers are becoming polluted. What we have is an environmental crisis, that is also creating social disruption and uncertainty. The farmers are throwing their hands up in the air because everything they know about when to plant and when to harvest is challenged and has to change. Not necessarily related to climate change, but certainly, business has been through COVID, and we were just talking about the readjustments business has made in the last couple of years. I think the climate for business and the demands on business are very different than they were 10 years ago. I think at this point it's really incumbent on us as a sector in society to actually make things that are useful and that help solve the real problems that we have both environmental and social. At the very minimum I think businesses have an obligation to clean up after ourselves if we're polluting in a certain way or we're generating a certain ways to not wait for the regulators to come after us but to change our processes so that we no longer do those things. That's the big change the urgency of making business a good actor not just a value-free profit-producing sector of society or job-providing sector of society that we actually have to be good players.

Deidre Woollard: Building off of that one of the things on your checklist was that every company needs to consider the Earth as a stakeholder. It sounds to me like you're seeing some companies do that. What are some examples that you see that they're promising or are optimistic and hopeful?

Vincent Stanley: I think a lot of companies have responded in different ways. Walmart, for the last 15 years, Walmart, I think is the largest supplier of organic food in the country. They have done things like figure out how to feed the dairy cows in order to reduce the methane produce. Unilever is an interesting example during Paul Polman's administration of refusing to report quarterly. I think they determined that of their 400 brands, 40 of them produced half the profits and also a lot of the innovations that would create the business of the future. Danone made its US subsidiary a B Corp which is one of the largest B Corps in the world. Nike has been an expert at reducing its resource impacts really making products with minimal amount of materials. There are a lot of companies not all of them are all we would consider great players in all ways, but all of those are seriously doing things to reduce their environmental impact.

Deidre Woollard: You mentioned B Corp a couple of times, and what do you think in general of the B Corp status for publicly traded companies? There aren't too many B Corps that have gone public. Do you expect that this is going to grow over time? I know the rules for becoming a B Corp and remaining a B Corp. They're strict, and do you think that's a concern?

Vincent Stanley: Yes. But what I've seen is more and more large companies are interested in becoming B Corps, particularly international. This was a small company movement as little as five years ago, and I think that's changing. What we found we became a B Corp and also a California Benefit Corporation which are legal status. I think the advantages for us have been the impact assessment which we borrowed from in the checklists on the future of responsible company. That impact assessment gives us a holistic look at our practices that we really can't get anywhere else. Also, I think for companies that are trying to do the right thing it gives them colleagues. It gives them people to call up on the phone and say, hey, we're grappling with this plastics problem for instance, and what have you found? I think it's an important movement.

Deidre Woollard: It also gives more benchmarks which I think we need. You mentioned plastics. That is a huge problem that I think so many companies are wrestling with. What is your take on some of the ways the plastics problem can be eased a little bit?

Vincent Stanley: I think they're going to be multiple approaches to this. Our biggest plastic problems comes from microfiber pollution. Particularly all fabrics shed microfibers in the laundry. But the problem with nylon and polyester is because they're oil-based, they persist in the water. If they get out of your washing machine and into the municipal water system and then flow into the ocean, they end up in the stomachs of sea birds and animals. We all have like a credit card's worth of plastic in our bloodstream from all of the plastic waste generated. We had an interesting collaboration. I was talking to a group of Samsung executives and mentioned to them this problem message. We're considered a great environmental player, but we have our problems, too, and this is one of them. We said we can't get any washing machine manufacturer to work with us and they rose to that. They actually developed a filter that filters at 98% of microfiber. Now, their competitors are also trying to come up with the same filter. That's one approach. We're also working with an NGO in Vancouver on how can municipal water systems also work on the problem. The big issue probably is how do you reduce the amount of plastic [laughs] that's generated in just a tremendous amount of waste from packaging and then from the products themselves.

Ricky Mulvey: As always, people on the program may own stocks mentioned, and the Motley Fool may have formal recommendations for or against so don't buy or sell anything based solely on what you hear. I'm Ricky Mulvey. Thanks for listening. We'll be back tomorrow.