I’ve decided I hate finance and accounts, it doesn’t make any sense and there are so many ways to read the numbers that you never really know if the company is actually doing well or just preparing to do well or simply slowly failing.
Take Microsoft for example who just posted record Q4 revenue with the announcement that they brought in $18.06 Billion in the last 3 months… 3 months… Now that’s pretty incredible.
However they actually made a net loss of $492 million compared to this time last year when they reported a net profit of $5.87 Billion.
Why’d they make such a loss? I honestly have no idea but I’ll theorise that it has a ton to do with the development costs behind Microsoft Surface, Windows 8 and the next Xbox along with the acquisition costs of Skype and the like.
The actual department that Xbox sits in reported a huge growth in revenue to $1.78 Billion but this is largely down to the newly found Skype income and doesn’t give us much insight into the financial situation behind the Xbox.
However Microsoft did also announce that the Xbox 360 has been the top selling console in America for the past 18 months running and with the next Halo just around the corner and nothing bigger than that on the PS3 or Wii front until next year I can’t see that trend stopping anytime soon.
Last Updated: July 20, 2012
