Earnings Labs

Microsoft Corporation (MSFT)

Q3 2018 Earnings Call· Thu, Apr 26, 2018

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Greetings and welcome to the Microsoft Fiscal Year 2018 Third Quarter Earnings Conference Call. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. It is now my pleasure to introduce your host, Mike Spencer, General Manager of Investor Relations. Thank you. You may begin.

Michael Spencer - Microsoft Corp.

Management

Good afternoon and thank you for joining us today. On the call with me are Satya Nadella, Chief Executive Officer; Amy Hood, Chief Financial Officer; Frank Brod, Chief Accounting Officer; and Carolyn Frantz, Deputy General Counsel and Corporate Secretary. On the Microsoft Investor Relations website, you can find our earnings press release and financial summary slide deck, which is intended to supplement our prepared remarks during today's call and provides a reconciliation of differences between the GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures. Unless otherwise specified, we refer to non-GAAP metrics on the call. The non-GAAP financial measures provided should not be considered as a substitute for, or superior to, the measures of financial performance prepared in accordance with GAAP. They are included as additional clarifying items to aid investors in further understanding the company's third quarter performance in addition to the impact that these items and events had on the financial results. All growth comparisons we make on the call today relate to the corresponding period of last year, unless otherwise noted. We will also provide growth rates in constant currency when available as a framework for assessing how our underlying businesses performed, excluding the effect of foreign currency rate fluctuations. Where growth rates are the same in constant currency, we refer to the growth rate only. We'll post our prepared remarks to our website immediately following the call until the complete transcript is available. Today's call is being webcast live and recorded. If you ask a question, it will be included in our live transmission, in the transcript and in any future use of the recording. You can replay the call and view the transcript to the Microsoft Investors' Relations website. During this call, we will be making forward-looking statements, which are predictions, projections or other statements about future events. These statements are based on current expectations and assumptions that are subjects to risks and uncertainties. Actual results could materially differ because of factors discussed in today's earnings press release, in the comments made during the conference call and in the Risk Factors section of our Form 10-K, Forms 10-Q and other reports and filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. We do not undertake any duty to update any forward-looking statement. And with that, I'll turn the call over to Satya.

Satya Nadella - Microsoft Corp.

Management

Thank you, Mike, and thanks to everyone on the phone for joining. It was another strong quarter, the result of picking the right secular trends, delivering differentiated innovation and focused execution that results in increased engagement and usage. The intelligent cloud and the intelligent edge era is already upon us. It represents a tremendous opportunity. We took significant steps this quarter to put this at the forefront of everything we do, realigning our entire engineering organization to accelerate innovation and better serve the needs of customers and partners. With that as a backdrop, I want to highlight key areas of innovation and growth across our customer solutions. Creating a modern workplace where people can do their best work requires the right culture and the right technology. Microsoft 365 helps every organization empower their employees with AI-backed tools that unlock creativity, increase teamwork and fuel innovation, all the while ensuring compliance and protecting data from new cyber threats. Microsoft is a clear leader in cloud security. Advanced AI reasons over hundreds of billions of signals each month to identify anomalies, automate detection and help customers respond to cyber threats. Just last week, we announced new value for customers, Microsoft Secure Score, Attack Simulator and Windows Defender ATP automatic detection and remediation capabilities, as well as a new open API for the Intelligent Security Graph. We've also built compliance capability directly into our cloud services. Thousands of organizations are using the recently launched Compliance Manager with new information protection scanner and built-in classification capability to help prepare for GDPR. Our comprehensive approach and proactive protection are one reason Coca-Cola chose Microsoft cloud for their digital transformation. One year in, Teams has rapidly become the hub for teamwork. More than 200,000 organizations in 181 markets use Teams from Maersk to General Motors. Teams…

Amy E. Hood - Microsoft Corp.

Management

Thank you, Satya, and good afternoon, everyone. Our third quarter revenue was $26.8 billion, up 16% and 13% in constant currency, with better than expected performance across all segments. Gross margin increased 16% and 13% in constant currency. Operating income increased 23% and 20% in constant currency. Earnings per share was $0.95, increasing 36% and 31% in constant currency. From a geographic perspective, we saw broad-based strength across markets of all sizes, benefiting from the positive global corporate IT spend environment. Growth in cloud services increased our commercial annuity mix, up 2 points year-over-year to 89%. Along with healthy renewals, our sales teams and partners drove a higher volume of new business, leading to commercial bookings growth of 26% and 18% in constant currency. Commercial unearned came in slightly above our expectations due to FX, growing 20% and 17% in constant currency. Commercial cloud revenue was $6 billion, increasing 58% and 55% in constant currency, highlighted by healthy growth in the U.S., Western Europe and the UK. We again improved commercial cloud gross margin, now at 57%, up 6 points, with improvement in each cloud service, most notably Azure. We outperformed our expectation on company gross margin, finishing the quarter at 65%. We are up slightly year-over-year with improvement in our Productivity and Business Processes segment from Office 365 commercial and LinkedIn, offset by a decline in our intelligent cloud segment, driven by a greater mix of Azure revenue. FX positively impacted revenue growth by 1 point more than expected, 3 points at the company and Productivity and Business Processes level and 2 points on both intelligent cloud and More Personal Computing. FX added 2 points of growth to COGS and operating expenses, 1 point more than expected. Operating expenses grew 10% and 8% in constant currency as we continued…

Michael Spencer - Microsoft Corp.

Management

Thanks, Amy. We'll now move over to Q&A. Operator, can you please repeat your instructions?

Operator

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, at this time we be will conducting the question-and-answer session. Our first question is coming from the line of Heather Bellini with Goldman Sachs. Please proceed with your question. Heather Bellini - Goldman Sachs & Co. LLC: Great. Thank you, Satya and Amy. You guys are seeing a really nice acceleration in intelligent cloud gross profit growth. And with 15 straight quarters now of triple-digit premium services growth in Azure, I know you mentioned some comments directionally about the gross margin ramp. But how do we think about the pace of the ramp in gross margin expansion from here for this, for Azure in particular, as you approach what we estimate to be roughly an $8 billion business in annualized revenue? And I guess the other thing that would be helpful is when you think of the COGS of commercial cloud, can you give us a rough ballpark of what percentage of COGS comes from CapEx depreciation? Thank you.

Satya Nadella - Microsoft Corp.

Management

So maybe I'll start and then I'll have you, Amy, go into sort of the numbers. One of the things, Heather, that's happening is there is growth in Azure across each of the layers. And I think I've said this before. Sometimes, when you have new workloads and new customers onboard, they start with in some sense the IaaS and the data more at Blob storage, but then scale to higher layer services like our Cosmos DB or even some of our compute higher-level services like in AI. So that I think will continue, because we're still in the early innings of the cloud transition. We're investing aggressively, whether it's on the field side or on the CapEx side to attract more customers and more workloads per customer. So they will have that same profile, which is lower-margin services first, higher-margin services over time. That's just inside of Azure. And of course, you combine that with the rest. One of the things that I think should be fairly clear is the high correlation between our services in Office 365 as well as Dynamics 365 around data in particular with Azure. So that's why we think of this as one cloud play but that should give you a feel for how the customers are looking at it.

Amy E. Hood - Microsoft Corp.

Management

And I think to your specific questions, there were a couple in there, Heather. If you think about the portion of our commercial cloud gross margins that come from depreciation, it's best to think of it as roughly half. And actually it's been going up as we began to get scale through these services over time actually. Some of the fixed costs, frankly, even in COGS, tend to come down as a percentage over time. So that should help you roughly to think about how much depreciation is at that number. Now, if you think about some of the dynamics that we've been going through in the intelligent cloud segment, in particular the way I tend to think about that, as you've seen, we're now 20% growth this quarter in that server and product services KPI, 17% on a constant currency basis, and are sort of confident that you should continue to see that, as I said, into Q4 and then into FY 2019 as well. I tend to think about that as we'll have significant revenue growth in that segment. We'll have significant gross margin dollar growth in that segment, and you'll actually continue to see operating margin dollar growth that's significant in that segment even as we reinvest into it, given the top line signal. If you think about gross margins in particular, what you'll see is Azure continuing to be a growing percentage of the total revenue growth. So even with significant improvement again in, what Satya was talking about, some of the lower level IaaS and PaaS services within Azure, on the gross margin side you'll see some gross margin percentage pressure in that segment through 2019, but with significant dollar growth. Heather Bellini - Goldman Sachs & Co. LLC: Great. Thank you.

Michael Spencer - Microsoft Corp.

Management

Thanks, Heather. We'll take next question now, please.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. The next question is coming from the line of Mark Moerdler with AllianceBernstein. Please proceed with your question. Mark L. Moerdler - Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. LLC: Thank you very much, and congrats on the quarter. CapEx increased significantly this quarter, $2.9 billion you said in cash on property and equipment. We know that you build out – you significantly invest in the data center footprint ahead of demand, but you don't build out the equipment itself that far in advance. Is there a large corporate or government requirement or is it the acceleration in the new data centers that ended up causing that lift? Or is there something else driving it? And as a follow-up, how should we think about that for the next couple quarters? Thanks.

Amy E. Hood - Microsoft Corp.

Management

Thanks, Mark. I actually didn't think of it as a significant change in trajectory from what we expected. A year ago, Q3 was actually a little low. So on the year-over-year basis, I think it pops a little bit, Mark, when on really a sequential basis I actually don't think, to me, it looks out of sorts, especially with the type of demand we're seeing, not just for Azure, but across all of the cloud components. Those growth rates really at 58% on that total cloud number, it's pretty good demand signal on a global basis. So I hear you on a year-over-year basis, but Q3 was a little funny a year ago on that front.

Satya Nadella - Microsoft Corp.

Management

And we continue to really monitor the actual equipment in that supply chain and what have you. And if anything, there's a lot of automation and demand sensing capability we have there.

Amy E. Hood - Microsoft Corp.

Management

Yeah. And I would say, Mark, while I appreciate your point that it takes – and we do build data centers in advance, the majority of the cost obviously in a data center is in the equipment inside. And so, while this really is – the majority of this spend is servers. Mark L. Moerdler - Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. LLC: Perfect. Thank you.

Michael Spencer - Microsoft Corp.

Management

Thanks, Mark. Operator, can we please move to next question?

Operator

Operator

The next question is coming from the line of Keith Weiss with Morgan Stanley. Please proceed with your question. Keith Eric Weiss - Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC: Excellent. Thank you, guys, for taking the question and really nice quarter across the board. There's really not much to pick on in this quarter. One of the highlights from my perspective was definitely LinkedIn and what seems to be an acceleration in the revenue growth in LinkedIn. So a two-parter here. One, where are we in terms of that acquisition? Is this still just LinkedIn operating better as an independent company or are we starting to see some of the synergies, specifically revenue synergies, come to bear from maybe broader distribution channel that they get from Microsoft or product integration? So have synergies started to kick in, number one? And number two, given where we are in terms of the M&A process on LinkedIn, what's the appetite for further like large M&A for Microsoft on a going-forward basis?

Satya Nadella - Microsoft Corp.

Management

Thanks, Keith, for the question. Let me start and then, Amy, you can add to this. First of all, it is very important for us to ensure that we did everything to enable LinkedIn to keep their product and cultural ethos of putting members first and innovating on their behalf. I mean, that was sort of our priority one, two and three. And that's what you see in their sessions growth, engagement growth, their quality member growth. And obviously that all translates into the revenue growth as well across all of the marketing solutions, talent solutions, and sales solutions. We also, during that one year, done integrations. You see it. I see it every day in my Outlook Mobile. I see it in Sales Navigator and Dynamics. And so, you will see us – with Windows 10, so you'll see us continue to do these integrations that add value again to both the Microsoft 365 and Dynamics users, as well as LinkedIn members. And clearly that's increasing engagement as well and that obviously then translates into revenue growth of those business solutions we mentioned. So, yes, revenue synergies are showing up, but mostly because product synergies are showing up, and that's because of the product ethos of LinkedIn around member-first is what we have maintained throughout this integration.

Amy E. Hood - Microsoft Corp.

Management

And I would also add, Keith, the LinkedIn team has really done a tremendous job. So let me also say, after a year of working with them closely, my appreciation and, frankly, a lot of inspiration that I think you've seen in our own product development has been their focus on users and how important it is and how focused they are on it. In some of the products, I would urge people to look at the Outlook Mobile experience and how really meaningful the experience is for the user and the member. And I think sometimes it's harder for us to measure exactly what a revenue synergy means. But I think I look at this and say, at a 37% growth rate, plus some of the integrations we've seen and the growth in uses and users of things like Outlook Mobile, I believe that we're probably a little bit on the front end of the revenue synergies you'll see in product over time. When it comes to our appetite for M&A, actually it has remained unchanged, which is when things meet our criteria and when we feel like it's in core areas for us, where markets are expanding, where the companies have a unique asset, I think that our ability to both execute on those and see them both execute on their own and execute inside Microsoft, I actually feel quite good that we don't worry about our ability to do them, but I wouldn't say that's new this quarter.

Satya Nadella - Microsoft Corp.

Management

Yeah. And I think just to add on that, which is whether it's Minecraft or LinkedIn or many other acquisitions we've done as part of Azure, I think the key thing that we are very, very focused on is how do we make this culturally accretive, management times accretive as well as revenue. And that's where we are building good muscle and we'll continue on that. Keith Eric Weiss - Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC: Excellent. Thank you very much guys.

Michael Spencer - Microsoft Corp.

Management

Thanks, Keith. We'll take the next question now please.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. The next question is coming from the line of Karl Keirstead with Deutsche Bank. Please proceed with your question.

Karl E. Keirstead - Deutsche Bank Securities, Inc.

Analyst

Thanks. And just to start, Satya and team congrats on getting Microsoft to over 10% organic growth. That's a big achievement for a company at your scale, and it looks like you're expecting the same for the June quarter, so congrats. So I guess, my question is in the spirit of this, to Amy, on the overall growth margin trade-off as you look into fiscal 2019. Amy, when I go back to the Analyst Day you had almost a year ago, I left thinking that your messaging was really that you were going to press on revenue growth and not on big margin leverage. So I'm just wondering as we look into fiscal 2019, is it correct to assume that that's a similar framework with the focus on top line growth and not to expect much in the way of overall improvement in gross margins? Thank you.

Amy E. Hood - Microsoft Corp.

Management

Thanks, Karl. Yes, I think that's a fair interpretation of my commentary both last year and this, which really speaks to consistency. I do believe that the market that which we are operating, the set of assets we've picked, the team we've built, the investments we made in our sales force, even some extent the acquisitions we've done, these are all showing up as top line revenue growth for us. You see it this quarter. You see it frankly in the guide. And I think your interpretation that our focus on being a growth company, even at our scale, is certainly the right interpretation.

Karl E. Keirstead - Deutsche Bank Securities, Inc.

Analyst

Okay. Thanks for that.

Michael Spencer - Microsoft Corp.

Management

Thanks, Karl. Let's please move to the next question.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. The next question is coming from the line of Walter Pritchard with Citi. Please proceed with your question.

Walter H. Pritchard - Citigroup Global Markets, Inc.

Analyst

Hi, Thank you. I'm wondering, maybe a combination of Amy and Satya, talk about the forward kind of view of Azure growth and how we should think about the drivers of that as we go into 2019. New customers existing consumption, premium services and I think we're growing at eye-popping rates right now. We saw that with Office 365 in the early days. How should we expect this business to sort of level out over time as I think it inevitably will as we look to next year?

Satya Nadella - Microsoft Corp.

Management

Yeah and I'll start qualitatively. And it's true that we are at this point at scale on Azure and with very, very high growth rates. But as I said, I think the key things that we think about is differentiation of Azure at each level because that's what is super important for us as we compete in this marketplace and more importantly double down on areas of differentiation we have. So the first thing is on the infrastructure side itself with the combination of the edge and the cloud I believe between Azure Stack and Azure as well as inclusive of our servers, we have the best crowd platform for what is going to be hybrid computing and we'll continue to push on that, so you'll see growth. It's just got a different margin profile. The layer above that is the place which we are very excited about. We've seen lots of consecutive quarters of growth in our higher-level services but we're now seeing some good scale. I, for the first time, talked about Cosmos DB. This was actually a database we just launched last year. I mean, I've been around databases for a long time. I've never seen a product that's gotten to this kind of scale this quickly. And so we're very bullish about what can happen in the higher-level services and we'll continue to build on that piece. But as I said, one of the key things is, architecturally, the way we build Azure, the way we build Office 365, the way we build our gaming cloud and the way we build even Dynamics are all pretty much one architecture. And you see that even in the way customers use it. So overall to your specific question on Azure, the growth will moderate as the numbers become big, and they've already become very big. But that said, we see plenty of opportunity for total gross margin growth in terms of dollars just because of the number of markets that we participate, in which we by the way, never participated in the old server world.

Amy E. Hood - Microsoft Corp.

Management

And, Walter, I think the way you see that show up is really in my conversation on FY 2019, to Satya's point, really we talked about that server product and KPI being high teens through FY 2019. We're really confident in double-digit growth in that PBP segment with the components of Office 365, Dynamics 365 and LinkedIn. So if you think about that as the primary components of our commercial cloud overall, we're certainly saying that it's a big business growing very fast at $6 billion not counting LinkedIn. At 58% growth, it certainly speaks to having a big base and a big growth number. On Azure, you're right. It will moderate through next year. But because of the scale at which it's operating, that's why you still see that server KPI remain at that high level even as the base grows. And so you will see also some different dynamics within that Azure revenue number. Satya mentioned the layers of Azure. If you think about the IaaS and PaaS numbers, I would expect to be on the higher end of growth rates. And some of the services that are more per-user like, like EMS within the Azure frame, you would expect that growth to moderate somewhat more quickly just because it's a per-seat business. You will actually over time see us be able to continue to add ARPU and growth in those segments. Think of it almost like an Office business. Internally, we call that component part of our Microsoft 365 Value. That's how we sell it externally even. And so hopefully, that helps give a little context to the number as well as our overall ability to continue to grow the sort of hybrid cloud opportunity high teens.

Walter H. Pritchard - Citigroup Global Markets, Inc.

Analyst

Thank you.

Michael Spencer - Microsoft Corp.

Management

Thanks Walter. We'll take the next question please.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. The next question is coming from the line of Phil Winslow with Wells Fargo. Please proceed with your question.

Philip Winslow - Wells Fargo Securities LLC

Analyst

Hey guys, thank you guys for taking my question and congrats on a great quarter. Satya, you touched on the synergies that you're seeing between new applications businesses and LinkedIn helping the two out. Wonder if you could talk just sort of high level and strategically about applications and enterprise applications in Azure, and how you kind of see the synergy potentially coming out between those, especially when you think about Azure AI and all the services, or kind of the question is, how important or how critical are applications like the growth that we're seeing in Dynamics, et cetera?

Satya Nadella - Microsoft Corp.

Management

Yes, I mean, one of the things that I talked about in my remarks this time was this power platform. One of the areas of in fact real breakout growth in differentiation as being in Power BI, PowerApps and Flow. For the first time in fact, in our own Microsoft history, we have an extensibility model that is the same for Office 365 and Dynamics 365. This has been a dream of mine for, I don't know, for 15 years probably. And we are finally here and we are executing super well. But the interesting thing is it's not just even for our own SaaS applications. It is the extensibility model for every SaaS application out there, including a common data model. So I think that that's where the synergies lie, because AI starts with having a data estate that can really bring data from all of your applications, silos in some sense, together so that you can start doing, building that analytical power that you can then visualize and put in the hands of people using Power BI or run an AI model that does some prediction that you can deploy in your system, whether it's forecasting, sales lead scoring, what have you. So that workflow, we have every layer of it. We have the best deployment tools and development tools in Azure. We have this common data model. On top of this, we have the best BI visualization technology. So that's what you're seeing increasingly as the synergy. But most importantly, architectural benefit for customers because by having incoherence around these layers is where you may feel like you're making some great best-of-breed sort of choices in individual layers, but you'll bear that expense in your overall agility as well as your overall management of your data. And that's where I think we will be very differentiated.

Philip Winslow - Wells Fargo Securities LLC

Analyst

Great, thanks guys.

Michael Spencer - Microsoft Corp.

Management

Thanks. Let's move to the next question please.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. The next question is coming from the line of Ross MacMillan with RBC Capital Markets. Okay, we'll move on to the next question which is coming from the line of Brad Reback with Stifel. Please proceed with your question. Brad Robert Reback - Stifel, Nicolaus & Co., Inc.: Great, thanks very much. Maybe Amy, quick question. The Windows OEM Pro business has been extraordinarily strong the last few quarters. Could you maybe give us a sense of how penetrated you guys are in the Windows 10 corporate upgrade cycle and the sustainability of that growth? Thanks.

Amy E. Hood - Microsoft Corp.

Management

Thanks Brad. Let me, first, I wouldn't say penetration is the word for this. Let me talk about this in two or even a couple of components, because when you think about Windows 10, what we've seen over the past couple of years is, you're right, a very strong enterprise deployment cycle and real pull for that product inside enterprises, because of the security value prop of the product itself. When you see that deployment for security reasons, an externality of that is people often choose to upgrade machines in that process. We've seen good demand inside commercial entities for and when they make those upgrades to buy Windows PCs and often Surface devices, in that choice, I think it's benefited our OEM partners and us. The portfolio of devices that are available are incredibly compelling. I think our partners have done a terrific job on that as well. The overall economy is certainly also quite good, and the installed base had actually gotten older. And so I think what you're starting to see is a process whereby there's a great product, there's a good macro environment. And you've got customers who really want to move to a modern infrastructure. A modern infrastructure has to both be secure at its very core, and that can result, as you're seeing through that confluence of events, in a very strong PC market with very strong Pro performance. And certainly, the guide for Q4 continues to imply all those factors. Brad Robert Reback - Stifel, Nicolaus & Co., Inc.: Great. Thanks very much.

Michael Spencer - Microsoft Corp.

Management

Thanks, Brad. We'll take next question now, please.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. Our next question is coming from the line of Michael Nemeroff with Credit Suisse. Please proceed with your question. Michael Nemeroff - Credit Suisse Securities (USA) LLC: Thanks for taking my question. Satya or Amy, can you help us understand the large revenue outperformance and guide for continued strong growth in gaming? And Amy, could you please give us a sense of the margin profile of the areas of gaming that exceeded expectations? And if you could also comment on the strength of the MPC margin in the context of the gaming margin as well, that would be helpful. Thank you very much.

Satya Nadella - Microsoft Corp.

Management

Yeah, I can start and then, yeah.

Amy E. Hood - Microsoft Corp.

Management

Why don't you start.

Satya Nadella - Microsoft Corp.

Management

Because even on gaming, very much like how we talk about some of our commercial segments, we've gotten a strategy which sort of really helps us articulate both the growth opportunity as well as our investments across all of the various layers. So first is, the console itself is the highest engagement console out in the marketplace. So anytime a new game, whether it's first-party or third-party releases, the fact that Xbox is where the best engagement is driven benefits us. So as a platform owner, that's a great growth area for us. But we don't stop there because now we have, whether it's Xbox Live, whether it's Game Pass or Mixer, these are all additional opportunities to really serve the gamer as they play more games or watch games on different platforms. So that's the other big opportunity. But the last one, which I think is new and is something which is already paying its dividends on the Azure growth side, is we've taken all the knowledge of what it means to build any one of these first-party titles of ours and building it as a PaaS service in Azure for game developers, and the PlayFab acquisition speaks directly to that. So those are all the various levers we have in gaming. And you'll see it in the MPC segment and you'll see it, as I said, increasingly over time even on Azure.

Amy E. Hood - Microsoft Corp.

Management

And I think, Michael, if you don't mind, I'm going to expand your question a little bit, because I don't think the increase in the MPC guide is simply gaming. So let me talk a bit about the components and which ones, I think, are a bit more sustainable and which ones may have a temporal nature to them. The performance in Q3 and the guidance for Q4 shows actually strong performance in a number of places that we expect to continue. OEM Pro is a terrific example, for the reasons I just gave in Brad's question. Windows commercial, which is really the business inside the enterprise of selling much of the security value on a far more annuity-like basis, we've seen strong double-digit billings growth there and we expect that to continue into Q4 as well. The next piece that I would say is a part of that sort of uplift in Q4 is our Surface device. The reception to Surface Book 2 as well as Surface Pro with LTE has been quite good. And you see us reflect that again in Q4 even as the comparable gets a little bit more difficult than it was in Q3 for us when you saw a very large growth rate. We're still expecting high teens there. Then you get to that gaming component, and specifically what Satya was talking about, the Xbox software and services component is where I would expect to see the impact of the continuation of Q3. Part of that, I want to be very clear, is consistent even going back a few quarters. That has been a double-digit grower. It will be a double-digit grower. There'll be some volatility in the number like anything else. And third-party hit games will move it higher as they did this quarter, and we're expecting in Q4. But there's also a really strong base to that business that is the result of what Satya's talking about in terms of having a vibrant platform with fans that believe in it and come to it with all the value that's been added. Michael Nemeroff - Credit Suisse Securities (USA) LLC: That's very helpful. Thank you very much.

Amy E. Hood - Microsoft Corp.

Management

So did that help? Okay, great. Thanks.

Michael Spencer - Microsoft Corp.

Management

Thanks, Michael. We'll move to the next question, please.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. The next question is from the line of Ross MacMillan with RBC Capital Markets. Please proceed with your question.

Ross MacMillan - RBC Capital Markets

Analyst

Thanks so much. Hopefully, the line is clear this time. So Satya and Amy, I wanted to ask about server products which was striking growth this quarter, given the comp. And, Amy, you talked about expected strength into fiscal Q4 and all of that, I guess, is testament to the strength of the kind of hybrid leadership you have. But the two questions though were really, is that strength in server products broad-based across Windows Server, SQL Server, System Center, et cetera? Or is there any sort of bias in the mix, if you will, in terms of what's driving that strength? And then, Satya, you mentioned Cosmos DB and that was a striking number to me as well. And I was just curious, do you think now you have the multi-model database in market that can help you take market share within the data management database space? Thanks.

Satya Nadella - Microsoft Corp.

Management

Yeah. I mean, I'll take the second one. I think that, yes, I mean, Cosmos DB's pretty unique capability in combination with everything else we do in both the data layer, the AI layer and the infrastructure layer, I think we have a tremendous opportunity, because, as I said, this AI era is mostly first a data era. And that's where I think the opportunity lies. But to your previous question, even there, there are multiple trends here, and Amy referenced it in her remarks, which is for example, virtualization still continues to be a growth driver of server products. The other growth driver of server products is cybersecurity and the security value in our servers. So that's one. The fact that we now have SQL and, for example, when you think about SQL itself, it's a hybrid product. You can tier SQL databases with the cloud. SQL is an AI product because we have the one database that actually allows you to write Python and R in situ, store procedures right in your database. So, for example, when we talk about data and AI close to data, because computation will always go wherever data is. And a lot of data shows up in relational databases and we have a growth driver there as well. And then there is the hybrid choices, where if somebody's building a smart factory, they're now looking and saying, what is the server I deploy in the factory to manage the millions of sensors that are there across the factory. And that's where Azure Stack shows up. So multiple drivers of what is essentially the server and cloud number in combination.

Amy E. Hood - Microsoft Corp.

Management

And to your point on the component, the on-prem component, even with comparable doing well, let me break Satya's comment into sort of two drivers that have been actually more sustaining. And it's across both Windows in particular, but also SQL, which are obviously the largest products within our server portfolio. The first exactly with hybrid demand. We have something called Azure Hybrid Benefits. What it does is really provide confidence to our committed customers buying on-prem servers that their transition to a hybrid, to cloud over a period of their agreement, is really about their choices, their timelines and their confidence. And so, with that right, it lets them easily transition between Windows or SQL to those same benefits in Azure with a small uplift in price. I think that has actually been a core component. The second one was the virtualization drive or data center modernization, another one, do move the premium mix up a bit. So that's, if you wanted to break it down into two more sustaining things, those are the types of things we're seeing in that number.

Michael Spencer - Microsoft Corp.

Management

Great. Thanks. And this will be our last question.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. Our final question is coming from the line of Kash Rangan with Bank of America Merrill Lynch. Please proceed with your question.

Kash Rangan - Bank of America Merrill Lynch

Analyst

Last question will be the longest one; really, really long. Thank you guys for getting me in. A question for you, Satya. As you meet with CEOs of large companies, this is a recurring theme that we've been hearing from other software company CEOs, the theme of digitization. Can you help us to understand, especially given that Microsoft's growth rate is accelerating whereas the GDP growth rate is the GDP growth rate. So obviously, tech spending or IT spending as a percentage of GDP or average company revenue is going higher. So can you help us, given your perspective, which is pretty unique, help us understand what is the baseline of IT that we've been operating in, when it comes to digital business transformation, what are the phase 1, phase 2, phase 3 initiatives like and where are companies likely to spend more? And what kinds of products and services that are new and upcoming or maybe you sell them today that comprise that incremental swing factor over the baseline of what IT is today versus wherever we're likely to go with the digitization of business processes? Thank you.

Satya Nadella - Microsoft Corp.

Management

Yeah, I mean, I think when we talk to customers and CDOs, CEOs, what have you, we talk about four digital transformational outcomes. In fact, everything that we do across our solution areas are all ingredients to helping our customers achieve digital transformation objectives on, for example, how do they engage their customers. When I talked about Cosmos DB growth, Cosmos DB happens to be one of the best database products to be able to capture the signals that you want around your customers from a variety of different sources. That's gone one example of it. The second piece is of course around empowering your employees. I mean, one of the things that now has increasingly become a number one priority for every CEO is to make sure that the right tools, the right products are in front of their own employees so that they can do their very best work and collaborate. So teams grow. There's a great example of how companies are modernizing their workforce with things like Microsoft 365. The third one is operational efficiency. When you see the Dynamics 365 growth or Azure IoT growth, taking every IoT project, it ends up as a field service project, so that's a classic way somebody says, let me sense something, predict something and then actually fix using field service. So that's a transformational outcome where we're very well positioned. And lastly, people are changing their business models. You take somebody like a Nalco Water. You could say they're a water company, but now they're pure water service company. In other words, they put sensors that allow them to actually deliver a very differentiated business model to their customers. And so that's the transformational outcomes we see. And we feel, at Microsoft, we're well positioned both with the technology but also with our frontline sales capability, service capability and partner capacity to best address the digital transformation needs.

Kash Rangan - Bank of America Merrill Lynch

Analyst

Wonderful. It seems like CRM, HCM, ERP, IoT, these are the predominant themes that are going to be driving your growth. Thank you very much. Very useful, insightful.

Michael Spencer - Microsoft Corp.

Management

Thanks, Kash. That wraps up the Q&A portion of today's earnings call. Thank you for joining us, and we look forward to speaking with all of you soon. You can find additional details at the Microsoft Investor Relations website.

Amy E. Hood - Microsoft Corp.

Management

Thanks, everyone.

Satya Nadella - Microsoft Corp.

Management

Thank you, everyone.

Operator

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, this does conclude today's teleconference. Again, we thank you for your participation, and you may disconnect your lines at this time.