San Francisco Unfavorable exchange rates make the software company Microsoft more cautious. Due to currency effects, the Group is now calculating sales of 51.94 billion to 52.74 billion dollars in the last quarter of the current financial year, according to a statement on Thursday. So far, it has been $52.4-$53.2 billion.
As a reason, Microsoft cited negative effects of exchange rates in the order of $ 460 million. The group also revised its forecast for net profit down by $ 250 million to a corridor of $ 16.85 billion to $ 17.43 billion. The shares fell by almost three percent at the start of trading and then recovered slightly.
Microsoft Chief Financial Officer Amy Hood had already warned in April about the negative effects of price fluctuations: “We expect that other income and expenses will have a negative value of $ 50 million, which reflects the impact of the revaluation of exchange rates due to market conditions in April.“
Microsoft did not disclose how it was doing apart from the exchange rate effects. The dollar has gained a lot compared to many currencies because of the turnaround in the key interest rate in the US. In the previous quarter, a strong cloud business had helped the Group to significantly increase sales and profit.
The company was able to rely on the cloud services of its Azure platform, which provides IT services and storage space on the network to many other companies and apps. But the business around the Xbox game console and hardware products such as Surface tablets also grew.
International technology companies have experienced a slump in their stock market valuations in recent months. The decline at Microsoft was about 20 percent compared to the peak in December. The Windows group is thus comparatively solid. The Facebook group Meta Platforms had lost about half of its market capitalization compared to the peak last year.
With agency material
