Microsoft Corporation (MSFT) — Q1 2015 Earnings Call Transcript

Thank you. 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 John Seethoff, Deputy General Counsel. On our website, microsoft.com/investor, we have posted our press release and a slide deck to provide the summary of our results of the quarter. Unless otherwise specified, all growth comparisons we make on the call today relate to the corresponding period of last year. Please note that we have recapped certain prior period amounts to conform with the current period presentation with no impact on consolidated net income or cash flow. Additionally, any reference to operating expenses includes research and development, sales and marketing, and general and administrative, but excludes integration and restructuring charges. We’ll post the 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 on the Microsoft Investor Relations website until October 23, 2015. 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 subject to risks and uncertainties. Actual results could materially differ, because of factors discussed in today’s earnings press release, in the comments made during this conference call and in the risk factor section of our Form 10-K, Form 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.

Thank you, Chris. Good afternoon everyone. Three months ago I outlined how Microsoft is the productivity and platform company for the mobile-first cloud-first world. Since then we have galvanized around this direction and are executing well. I am proud of the results we’ve delivered this quarter across all businesses. Results are up in every category from commercial to consumer to hardware. With $23.2 billion in revenue for this quarter, we’re off to a great start to the year. More importantly we’re also pleased with the progress we’ve made in evolving our culture to be fast, innovative partner-friendly and customer obsessed. As I reflect on this past quarter, there are four important indicators of progress that I want to highlight: cloud, Windows, hardware and finally I’ll talk about our ecosystem momentum. First, our cloud offerings continue to grow at a rapid rate. More people in organizations are signing up and we are generating more revenue across both commercial and consumer customers. Our commercial cloud revenue grew 128% year-over-year, the fifth consecutive quarter of triple-digit growth. In fact, we’re the only company with cloud revenue at our scale that is growing at triple-digit rates. Eighty percent of the Fortune 500 are now on the Microsoft Cloud. Office 365 commercial seats nearly doubled, with two out of every three new customers choosing our premium versions. Consumer Office 365 now exceeds 7 million subscribers, up more than 25% for the last quarter alone. We continue to invest in growing our leadership position in areas with great opportunity. To that end, we’re expanding our data center capacity to meet demand, provide the best customer experience, enable data solvency and deliver continuous innovation. As you are seeing robust growth because of our unique approach as the only hyper-scale public cloud provider with enterprise-grade capabilities and true private cloud and hybrid cloud offerings. We continue to add new features and capabilities faster than ever based on user feedback cycles. One major Azure feature is released every three days on average, opening up many new user scenarios for our customers. Our premium services on Azure create new monetization opportunities in media, data, machine learning and fast analytics as well as enterprise mobility. More than 60% of Azure customers are now using at least one of these premium services such as the Enterprise Mobility Suite, which is off to a very fast start. The top 10 ISVs love our open and flexible approach and are building on Azure at a rapid pace. In fact, 40% of Azure revenue now comes from startup ISVs. Even with our tremendous growth in public cloud, we are still seeing strength in our on-premise businesses with double-digit growth across Windows Servers, SQL Server, System Center and Dynamics. This is because of the unique hybrid and private cloud capabilities that are built into our service. The second indicator of progress is the improvement in the overall health of the Windows ecosystem in the first quarter. We introduced an expanded set of Windows offerings which helped drive consumer unit growth in quarter one and will provide incremental opportunities for the use of Microsoft services such as Bing. With these new offerings, OEMs are delivering exciting new devices at extremely attractive price points, including Windows PCs at $199 and below. In September, we took the first steps in publicly sharing more about the next generation of Windows. Windows 10 will unlock new experiences for customers to work, play and connect across an incredibly broad set of devices with screens from 4 inches to 80 inches and even IoT devices. Windows 10 will deliver a single unified application development platform, one way to write a universal app across the entire family of Windows devices and one store with a unified way for applications to be discovered, purchased and updated across all these devices. Think about it, with Windows 10 developers can build one app and thus expand to billions of devices. When I talk about putting customers at the center of everything we do, it’s especially true for Windows with incorporating customer feedback earlier than ever in the development cycle, especially with our enterprise customers. This will be the best Windows release ever for businesses. And with hundreds of thousands of pieces of feedback flowing into the team already, Windows 10 will be the most collaborative version of Windows we have ever shipped. Third, I want to highlight some specific markers of advancements in hardware and gaming. Across the entire hardware portfolio, I’m encouraged by the reception from customers and our continuously improving execution. Surface had strong results this quarter driven by positive customer response to Surface Pro 3. The product lineup is the right one and customers are responding favorably. Surface Pro 3 is now in 28 markets and importantly we have improved the business economics of this product line. With phones, we have moved quickly to integrate the business. We are executing on all of the restructuring changes we talked about in the last quarter while driving Lumia share growth. We saw modest growth over the prior year driven by sales in Europe where we gained share with lower-priced devices. Now let’s talk gaming. As I previously said, gaming is an important category that will drive additive business value for Microsoft. It is the single biggest digital live category measured in both time and money spent across devices of all types. We launched Xbox One in 28 markets, increased console unit sales from a year ago, and grew users of Xbox LIVE apps by more than 20%. The acquisition of Mojang, which we expect to close in November, extends our ecosystem and community across multiple platforms. Minecraft adds to our already strong portfolio of first-party games and content such as Halo and will strengthen our gaming experiences on PCs and consoles as well as cross-platform monetization. The fourth and final area I want to focus on today is the renewed energy and momentum in our partnerships. As a productivity and platforms company, we create vast opportunity for our partners through moving fast to extend our platforms and tools to reach more customers through partnerships; from SAP and Oracle to Salesforce, Adobe and IBM to the latest partnerships we announced this past week with Docker, Cloudera and CoreOS. Great partnerships emerge from great products, strong momentum and shared enthusiasm about a long-term vision. Technology leaders across the board recognize the customer value inherent in products like Office 365, Azure and Windows. And they want to align their businesses with our healthy and growing ecosystem. You’ll see more partnerships in the months ahead. It’s the best way to deliver the best possible experience for our customers in today’s heterogeneous mobile-first cloud-first world. In summary, I am pleased with the progress we’re making; things across the company are rallying around our core focus to reinvent productivity and create a platform for a mobile-first cloud-first world. We will continue to drive changes that will position us for the future. We will be accountable to our customers, partners and shareholders, and we will be relentless in looking for areas to invest for long-term growth. With that, Amy will go through our Q1 results in detail and share our outlook for Q2, and then I’ll join her for Q&A. Thank you very much.

Thanks and good afternoon everyone. As Satya said, we had a very strong start to the fiscal year. We made meaningful progress with improved execution across all our businesses. I am encouraged by what we have achieved and believe we’re well positioned for the future. With that said, let me take you through the financial highlights of our first quarter. Revenue was $23.2 billion, up 25% over last year and up 11% excluding phone. Earnings per share were $0.54 which included an $0.11 negative impact from integration and restructuring expenses. Excluding that impact, EPS grew 5% to $0.65, even after considering the impact of the phone business on profits. We’re accelerating the pace of decision-making and taking decisive actions to improve how we operate. This approach is reflected in the progress we’ve made in restructuring the company and integrating our phone business. As a result, we incurred charges of $1.1 billion this quarter. Geographically, we saw strong performance across the U.S. and Europe and consistent with Q4, a more challenging environment in China and Russia. Let me now discuss our results in greater detail. Our commercial business had another strong quarter. Revenue grew 10% and unearned revenue grew 12%. Renewal rates were higher than what we’ve seen in the recent first quarters. And in Office, one-third of renewals included Office 365. Importantly, we are seeing a mixed shift from on-prem to the cloud, from transactional purchasing to annuity and from standard to premium versions. Our commercial cloud services continued their exceptional trajectory with another quarter of triple-digit growth. We’re investing in higher level services and new scenarios in Azure enabled by the scale, cost and flexibility of the cloud. And these services are expanding our addressable market. We’re adding new users and importantly growing revenue from existing on-prem customers who have adopted Azure services. Our on-prem data platform infrastructure product continues to have strong momentum with an ongoing shift to premium versions. Revenue from premium skews was up 25% this quarter. Office 365 had another terrific quarter and remains on path to becoming the unparalleled leader for cloud-based productivity apps. CIOs are selecting Office 365 as the centerpiece of their hybrid productivity solutions as they look to meet the growing mobile needs of their employees. SMBs are also realizing the benefits of Office 365 and as a result are moving from transactional purchasing to subscription. And as Satya mentioned, we’re seeing good partnership momentum as other companies look to integrate Office 365 into their products. Turning to Windows. Windows OEM Pro revenue performed in line with the business PC market and volumes were more consistent with those seen before the XP refresh in fiscal ‘14. Windows volume licensing grew 10% as business customers continued to value the platform security and manageability. During the quarter, we took important steps to grow Windows usage and improve the health of the ecosystem. Both our existing and new OEM partners are bringing to market an expanded set of device offerings at more competitive price points. Channel inventories are higher than they were last year reflecting confidence from our OEM partners heading into the holiday quarter. IP licensing revenue declined this quarter as our license fees filled the higher mix of low-cost devices, resulting in lower per unit royalty. Consumer Office revenue, inclusive of our subscription offerings, grew 7% this quarter. Within this, we saw an accelerated transition to Office 365 Home and Personal, which contributed to a decline in traditional Office license revenue. Overall, it’s important to note that we continued to grow attach to consumer devices. In Bing, revenue was driven by both volume and rate growth, beginning to deliver double-digit monetization gains driven by investments in both relevance and ranking algorithm. These improvements keep us on the path to Bing profitability in fiscal ‘16. And consistent with prior quarters, display revenue remains under pressure. We are excited by Surface Pro 3 performance as unit sales are pacing at twice the rate of what we saw with Pro 2. We’re seeing strong interest from students, professionals and increasingly enterprises who are replacing their laptops and tablets with Surface Pro 3 for their productivity needs. Gross margin for Surface was positive this quarter. Within gaming, our results reflect a growing console market, our improved competitive position with the new Xbox One SKU, and the launch of Xbox One into new geographies including the initial channel sales with the launch in China at the end of Q1. As we head into the holiday season, we’re looking forward to the differentiated content that will be available on the Xbox platform including Sunset Overdrive which launches in late October and Halo: The Master Chief Collection which launches in early November. In Phone Hardware, the focus of the quarter was on positioning the business for the future. And we remain committed to reaching breakeven in fiscal ‘15. As part of our restructuring efforts, we started revitalizing our manufacturing capacity, creating one development team to accelerate the pace of innovation and focus our sales and marketing efforts on Lumia, which grew in several key markets. Sales of non-Lumia phones were down driven by declines in the underlying feature phone market, as well as portfolio rationalization as we execute on our phone strategy. Gross margin this quarter included the benefit of non-recurring items resulting from our business integration efforts. Operating expenses were favorable to our expectations as we chose to redeploy spend to projects occurring later this fiscal year. These decisions reflect our disciplined assessment as we prioritize where to best allocate our resources. Importantly, we continue to invest in developer and customer safety to capture the opportunities in key growth categories such as the cloud, Big Data and the Internet of Things. Our effective tax rate was 23% this quarter, influenced by the changing mix of our business, as well as operating losses and restructuring charges, some of which are not tax deductible. This quarter we had $1.3 billion of capital expenditure. We continue to expand the capacity and locations of our data centers to deliver higher service levels, reduce latency and help meet local data compliance requirements for our global customers. Importantly, even while making these investments, we continue to grow the gross margin of our cloud business. This quarter we increased our capital return by 19% with $4.6 billion returned to shareholders through buyback and dividends. As we said in September, the Board and management continue to assess our broader capital allocation strategy as they focus on increasing long-term shareholder value. With that overview of the current quarter, let me now turn to our outlook for the second quarter, starting with foreign exchange. Foreign exchange did not have a material impact on our Q1 results as movements were relatively late in the quarter. The following guidance is based on current FX rates, and should the U.S. dollar continue to strengthen, it will create headwinds in our foreign transactional business. The impact of FX on our annuity business was first to be reflected in deferred revenue as it is based on rates when the contract is billed and then into the P&L at that same rate as the revenue is recognized. Now moving on to guidance, starting with devices and consumer. In licensing, we expect revenue to be $4.0 billion to $4.2 billion. Remember, in Q2 of last year, we recognized about $650 million of revenue from our commercial agreement with Nokia, which has ended. While revenue recognition for the agreement was heavily weighted to Q2 based on contract terms, COGS recognized ratably over the course of the year. Consistent with the current quarter, IP licensing revenue will reflect lower per unit royalties with the changing mix of devices sold by our licensees. With the addition of Office 365 consumer services in Japan, the transition from traditional licensing to a subscription service will negatively impact revenue by approximately $100 million in Q2. We expect the ongoing business PC refresh cycle to continue. Their comparables are challenging as we began to see the benefit of XP end of support in Q2 of last year. We expect that the consumer PC market will remain stable with many of the same dynamics we saw in Q1. In computing and gaming, we expect revenue to be $3.5 billion to $3.8 billion. This range reflects growth in Xbox One consoles over the last year, but a mix shift to lower-priced SKUs announced last June. With the momentum we are seeing with Surface Pro 3, we expect units to grow sequentially. In phone hardware, we expect revenue to be $2.0 billion to $2.2 billion. This range anticipates both year-over-year and sequential growth in Lumia units driven by the 500 and 600 series devices. As a result of the ongoing market dynamics and our portfolio rationalization, we expect the volumes and ASPs of non-Lumia devices to decline in Q2. In devices and consumer other, we expect revenue to be $2.3 billion to $2.4 billion, which includes growth from Office 365, the launch of Halo: The Master Chief Collection and continued monetization gains in games. In commercial licensing, we expect revenue to be $10.8 billion to $11 billion, which includes a slight drag from the prior year’s estimated XP impact. With the accelerated shift to our cloud services, we expect commercial other revenue to be $2.5 billion to $2.6 billion. Overall, we expect our fundamental strength in our commercial business to continue. And in corporate, we expect about $300 million of positive revenue impact next quarter as we recognize prior period deferrals related to bundle offerings. We expect COGS to be $9.5 billion to $9.9 billion with variability driven by both hardware segments. We expect second quarter OpEx to be between $8.6 billion and $8.8 billion. As I mentioned earlier, our Q1 favorability was primarily driven by the timing and our continued prioritization of activities. Therefore, we still expect full year operating expenses to be $34.2 billion to $34.6 billion. And we remain committed to investing and prioritizing growth areas where we have customer momentum. Over the remainder of the fiscal year, we expect to incur an additional $500 million of expense related to our restructuring efforts. This results in total charges of roughly $1.6 billion, the high end of the range we provided in July. Separately, we are reducing our anticipated integration expenses down to a $100 million per quarter for the remainder of the fiscal year. As a reminder, other income and expense includes dividend and interest income offset by interest expense and the net cost of hedging. We expect these items to generally offset one another. We now expect our full year tax rate to be between 20% and 22%, including the impact of integration and restructuring. In Q2, we expect CapEx to sequentially increase in support of our growing cloud business. As you know, we typically see a decline from Q1 to Q2 on our unearned revenue balance. This Q2, we anticipate a slightly higher sequential decline in our non-commercial segments. This is primarily due to the $300 million impact from revenue recognition in corporate that I referenced earlier. We expect commercial unearned to be in line with historical trends with some of the benefit of our business model transition to annuity, offset by FX rate impact. In closing, this was another quarter of continued growth and disciplined execution. Across the company, we’re making thoughtful data-driven decisions to continually assess and prioritize our resources. We’re also investing to accelerate momentum in key strategic areas and to capitalize on emerging trends. We are making great progress in reshaping our company. And I’m encouraged by the opportunities to continue to create long-term shareholder value. And with that, I’ll turn it back over to Chris and we can move to Q&A.

Thanks, Amy. With that, we’ll move to our Q&A. Operator, can you please repeat your instructions.

Thanks. Good afternoon. On the commercial revenue, it continues to grow at an impressive double-digit rate. Many of your peers have not been doing quite as well as you have just in the last reported quarter. Amy, I know you mentioned you’re confident about this business continuing. I am curious if you could just maybe underscore what you feel you guys are doing differently than what’s happening in the peer group in underscoring that confidence going forward?

Let me start. Overall what we see is the increasing competitiveness of our products. And I think that’s really what’s reflected in our results. The cloud story I think is fairly clear at this point. The combination of Office 365, as well as Dynamics CRM in particular combined with Azure are driving our cloud growth. As it turns out the technology that we build for our cloud is what we incorporate in our server products, in fact our R&D expense is the same expense. And that’s made our server products very competitive. And so again those are our traditional competitors we’re seeing significant share gains across the entire infrastructure line of our server products in particular. And we’ve architected our cloud very differently. We are the only hyper-scale cloud provider that also thinks of our server product at the edge of our cloud. So, some of the hybrid capabilities of ourselves have increasing attaches and that’s also leading to our overall competitiveness, as well as monetization and margin. And so those are the trends we see in our numbers. We live in the same macro environment as the rest. But right now we’re confident about our competitiveness driving our results.

Thank you.

Thanks Brent. We’ll take the next question, please.

Thank you. And congrats on the quarter. Two quick questions related to cloud. Amy, can you give us a sense of what the revenue run rate for the commercial cloud was this quarter? And Satya, could you give us a little more on use cases for Azure? Is it more test-and-dev or are you seeing most of it being on the production side? Thanks.

Thanks Mark. As you know, we gave our run rate at the end of last quarter at $4.4 billion and the course we’ve said in our numbers have us on that continued trajectory as we hedge for Q1. So, I think the pace and our accomplishment to share gains remain on a good trend line.

And as far as the use cases, right now it’s actually pretty diversified. We talked extensively about the customer case studies at our cloud event last week. And it turns out that we have ISVs in many cases driving new applications on top of Azure. There are businesses like, for example, NVC that are reinventing their business models on top of Azure. We have customers using us for true hybrid deployments. For example, with SQL Server, you can have high availability using Azure; that’s a pretty common deployment now using Azure as the backplane for disaster recovery and high availability. But at this point, I would say, we have emerging ISVs and some of the global ISVs building SaaS applications on top of Azure driving a significant amount of growth of new businesses, the new business models emerging on Azure, as well as hybrid, which I would say are driving. One of the other categories that I see a lot of lately is IoT. And the way we participate just on the Azure side, we obviously participate even with our Windows Embedded, but on the cloud side we are seeing the attach to our emerging machine learning services as well as advanced analytics; that’s been one of the places where we are well suited for some of the emerging use cases.

Thank you very much.

Thank you, Mark. Next question please?

Excellent. Thank you guys and very nice quarter. First, a question for Amy. Given these nice gross margin improvements across the board, but did some one-time items. So, I was hoping you could help us understand where you’re seeing sort of underlying gross margin improvements, particularly if we look at sort of any improvements that you saw in the phone gross margins as well as the big improvement we saw in the cloud gross margins; how much of that should we look at as durable on a going-forward basis?

Thanks, Keith. Let me start with the cloud and then I’ll move to your phone question. Overall, in the commercial business, I think we continue to see gross margin improvement and that is sustainable improvement as opposed to I think what you characterized as some non-recurring things that I have mentioned. It continues to be improvements in scale, improvements in our infrastructure, improvements in utilization, really strong work across all of our engineering teams here. And so I think our year-over-year improvement as well as sequential improvement and our ability in the overall commercial business, you see the gross margins we did. As the mix shifts to the cloud, I think we’re all quite proud of. On to the phone business where I did call out non-recurring items due to the business integration expense. A more blended rate of those two is probably a better way to think about a go-forward margin. Although, when you’re transitioning any business and all the hard work that we’re doing here to prepare ourselves going forward, I do expect to see some volatility in that number.

Just to add one thing that I’d say is sort of to Mark’s question, which is in particular on Azure, we have some commodity workloads but we also have many differentiated higher-margin workloads, especially in the Enterprise Mobility Suite, is what I’d call out as a good example of an infrastructure workload completely in the cloud that has got a very different margin structure. And those are the things that really give us the ability to have a good margin structure for our cloud efforts.

Excellent. That’s very helpful. Thanks very much.

Thank you, Keith. Next question please?

Thanks guys. And congrats on another great quarter. I had a question on Office 365. Obviously, you all continue to see great growth both on the commercial and on the home and personal side. But we also saw Office commercial products and services continue to grow 5%. So one question for Satya and one for Amy. Satya, how do you feel right now about this momentum, particularly on the commercial side that you’re seeing in Office 365 and sort of how you’re targeting larger enterprises versus SMBs? Then Amy, obviously you’ve talked about some cannibalization of end-period revenue from the Xbox 365, where you could help us kind of frame that 5% this quarter on the product and services and how we should think longer term about the revenue and the profitability there? Thanks.

I’ll start and then Amy I’ll turn it over to you. Specifically on Office 365, the overall product depth and breadth is continuously improving. One of the great benefits of Office 365 that our customers get to enjoy is that as we innovate and launch new features, they get to use them as soon as we have deployed on our cloud. And so that’s what’s driving both the competitiveness, as well as usage of Office 365 and quite honestly, the full consumption of what we build, which I think in the long run is super important to us and our customers. But it also turns out some of the server products we have as we see increasing adoption of the cloud. We still have, as I said, very competitive server products. I mentioned a lot of our infrastructure server products, but take something like Lync. It’s a fantastic product, it is again gaining share in the marketplace, it’s getting deployed in on-premise solutions. So, it’s the combination that’s driving our growth. The other dimension we’re seeing is Office 365 is a cross-platform cloud service. We see now coverage across all devices and that leads to customers still using the service even more. So that combination of effects, competitive server products, very competitive cloud service with new features being added all the time, as well as cross-platform is what’s driving our growth.

And let me try to take the second part of that question, Phil, which is really through the dynamics of the transactional business to move to the cloud and how I think about bridging those numbers. Our Office transactional business was down this quarter and the difference, as you said, because of the 5% growth is clearly the growth in Office 365 all up. We go to a place I think always I’d like to point to in terms of triangulating when I look at the health of the overall transition is renewal rates; our renewal rates are amongst the highest we’ve had in Q1, both our ability to recapture both the contract, as well as the revenue and the value and add services is higher than it has been. In addition, we’re seeing premium units added more frequently in the cloud than we have on-prem. And those types of mixes, you will see both bookings number, as well as in the unearned balance growth. And so, while the exact dollars in any given quarter may be difficult to triangulate on the components. I always look to see health, I’ve outlined there specifically in the Office business.

Great. Thanks guys.

Thanks Phil. We’ll go to the next question please?

Yes, thanks. I wanted to follow-up on Phil’s question. I think that Office transition, our analysis suggests that’s a net benefit from here for you. I’d like Satya some thoughts maybe about the transition for the rest of the business, if you’ve got server and tools at some point, I mean it continues to show really terrific growth at some point. I suppose that becomes cannibalized by your cloud business with Azure. Maybe Satya, if you can share how you think that transition, how long, how does it transpire or any thoughts on you shouldn’t be net additive to the revenues and operating income as we’ve seen on the Office side? Maybe if you could talk on Windows as well, it looks like OEM down a little bit this quarter, which is big than growing or we cannot see a lower ASPs with these $200 devices coming out this fall.

Let me talk a little bit about the dynamics we’re seeing in particular with our infrastructure servers, as well as Azure because it is actually pretty unique, I think to at least our product offering. As I said, our servers have become much more competitive because of the same technology investments that we’re making in our cloud. And the use cases that we see in the cloud in many cases happen to be net new workloads. IoT was not driving our server growth traditionally, mobile backend was not driving our servers traditionally. So, a machine learning and advanced analytics are areas we did not participate even in the past. So, one of the things that we have seen is a lot of new use cases of Azure, which were really new Greenfield territory for us. And it turns out that the need for more computing, more storage and more infrastructure server products is much broader than just even the hyper-scale public cloud because the one thing that is true is there are more devices in that unit backend. And that backend in many cases in regulatory industries with the geo-participation we have is needed everywhere. So one of the things that we are in fact very focused on is enabling others to build their own clouds. So, our private cloud premium mix is also growing; you see that in our results. So, at least in the intermediate timeframe, we do not see cannibalization. We see more impact of this hybrid, private, as well as public cloud all being complementary. And of course, being used together delivered more value to customers and that’s where our competitive advantage comes. On the Windows side just to finish off, we wanted to make sure that we have competitive Windows ecosystem participation across all the price points. So we made some deliberate changes to our business model and that is in fact playing out in the marketplace where we now have very competitive full Windows PCs less than $199 going into this holiday season. And that in fact in Q1 caused the market to expand. That was really by design and so we are happy to see that. And so on a blended basis, of course, the ASPs will be different because of the two ranges. But overall that’s what our goal is. We want to be able to make sure that we compete on all price points and overall grow the volume.

Thank you.

Thanks. We’ll go to the next question please.

Hi, thanks. Satya, I’m wondering if you can talk about, you’re seeing some progress on the cloud gross margins and you’re also investing pretty heavily. And I’m wondering how important it is for you kind of medium to long-term to be able to get things like Bing, Xbox LIVE and Office 365 running on the same infrastructure as Azure in terms of getting the kind of sale you want and ultimately driving the margins to where you want it to get to; is that sort of a prerequisite to get to where you’d like those margins to be?

Yes. I mean it’s an absolute prerequisite for us to have the entirety of our cloud infrastructure plant driving scale economics for us. And in fact, a lot of the core Azure technology around machine management and data center management comes out of our Bing efforts. We manage all of the supply chain as one supply chain; we do SKU design as one SKU design; we drive costs of both network storage and compute down altogether. In fact, you should think of Azure as the common fabric of all our applications. And you look at even some of our games like Halo, there’s significant usage of our cloud. And that’s what’s really driving some of the economics. In fact, I celebrate the fact that we don’t have just one first-party workload because it’s very easy for one first-party workload to completely occupy, if you will, the architecture of a cloud. But in our case, we have a very diverse set of workload. We have Xbox LIVE; we have Office 365; we have Dynamics and Bing and that diversity is what allows us to build, in fact, for our own needs, a cloud architecture that can meet many more workloads and that’s working pretty well for us.

Hi, thanks. Question for Amy; Amy, just thinking through your guide by business segment, everything seems roughly in line for the D&C licensing guide which implies I think a 24% year-over-year decline. And given that that’s a 19% gross margin business, I just want to make sure I understand what’s happening there. And I have two questions. I am wondering if you could help disaggregate how much of that is due to the tough XP-related compare versus some other perhaps one-time issues that make for a tough comparison. And then secondly, when in your best judgment do you think that D&C licensing revenue might turn positive? Thank you.

Great. Karl, thanks for asking that question; it gives me a chance to reiterate how many of those components are bit one-time in nature. The first and the largest issue is the end of the Nokia commercial agreement that’s about $650 million that we earned in Q2 of a year ago that because of the end of the agreement simply goes away. So, I’ll start with that point. The second component relates to the same trend we saw in our IP business that we saw in Q4 then in Q1, we’re doing and seeing again in Q2. So, I would also see that exact same trend line and assessment. The next component which is a change is we have actually launched some of our Office 365 consumer services in Japan, which is a geography that we had not been in historically. That does result in a revenue fall; it will end up in unearned. But that’s about a $100 million impact that we would not have seen before that. And so by the time you move all of that out of the comparison group, you really get back to very similar trends in our D&C licensing business that we saw this quarter for what I think was a component you are focused on, which is OEM Pro and OEM non-Pro, which we expect to really resemble the results we saw this quarter and marry to match up with PC business dynamics overall.

Okay. That’s very helpful. And if I could sneak in one more, Amy, the $2.9 billion share repurchase, it feels like an uptick compared to what you’ve done every quarter for the last couple of years. Is this sort of a new level that we can expect from Microsoft maybe just a thought on the pace of the share buyback?

Thanks for the question. We are proud of the increase in shareholder return this quarter, and importantly, we’re focused on how we can continue to do that as part of our overall long-term shareholder growth.

Great. Thanks Karl and thank you, Amy. With that, we’ll wrap up the Q&A portion of today’s earnings call. Please note that our second quarter earnings call will be held on Monday, January 26, 2015. We look forward to seeing many of you in the coming months at various investor conferences. For those unable to attend in person, these events will be webcast and you can follow our comments at microsoft.com/investor. Please contact us just if you need any additional detail. And thank you again for joining us.

Thanks everyone.

Thank you.