<div style="text-align: justify; "><b style="font-size: 1rem;">Microsoft on Tuesday reported a 12% drop in profit for the October-December quarter, reflecting the economic uncertainty it said led to its decision to cut 10,000 workers.</b><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The company reported quarterly profit of $16.43 billion, or $2.20 per share.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Excluding one-time items such as $800 million to pay severance to laid-off employees, the company based in Redmond, Washington, said it earned $2.32 a share, which topped Wall Street expectation for adjusted earnings of $2.29 a share. Microsoft’s stock was up more than 4% in extended trading following the release of its earnings report.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The software maker posted revenue of $52.75 billion in the October-December period, its second fiscal quarter, up 2% from the same period a year ago. Analysts polled by FactSet expected Microsoft to post revenue of $52.99 billion for the quarter.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Microsoft last week blamed “macroeconomic conditions and changing customer priorities” for its decision to cut nearly 5% of its global workforce. It’s one of a number of tech companies, including Google, Amazon, Salesforce and Facebook parent Meta, to announce mass layoffs.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Microsoft's personal computing business, centered on its Windows software, was widely expected to continue a deterioration that began earlier last year due to economic uncertainties and crimped demand. Quarterly sales from that segment dropped 19% to $14.24 billion, the company said Tuesday.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The company gets licensing revenue from PC manufacturers who install its Windows operating system on their products.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Market research firm Gartner reported that worldwide PC shipments in the October-December quarter declined 28.5% from the same period of 2021, the steepest quarterly decline since Gartner began tracking the market in the 1990s.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Among the factors reducing consumer demand for PCs were increased inflation, higher interest rates, the expectation of a global recession and the fact that many people already bought new computers during the COVID-19 pandemic, Gartner said.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">With a weak PC market, analysts were closely watching for results from Microsoft's other big business segments — namely, its cloud-computing division, where sales grew 18% to $21.51 billion. Revenue also grew from the company's workplace software segment — which includes the Office suite of products — by 7% to $17 billion.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">In a bid to further integrate the latest advances in artificial technology into its products, Microsoft on Monday announced a “multiyear, multibillion dollar investment” in the artificial intelligence startup OpenAI, maker of ChatGPT and other tools that can write readable text and computer code and generate new images. AP/UNB</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify; ">bnbd24/kh</div>