Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Brad Zelnick: Great. Thanks very much. Amy, I wanted to ask about the expense actions that you announced last week, obviously, not a decision that you would take lightly. How are you thinking about headcount for the remainder of the year and the possibility for further expense actions, if necessary? And what criteria do you consider in making these decisions? Thanks.

Amy Hood: Brad, listen, thanks for that question. Obviously, as we think about the Q4 guidance around low-single digit operating expense growth, we start to, as you know, sort of lap certain real acceleration points that we had last year. And we lapped the acquisitions both of Nuance and of Xandr. So, by the time that we get to the end of Q4, you will see very moderated headcount growth on a year-over-year basis in addition to some of the prioritization decisions we have made. And you are right. We take decisions like the one we had to make to get our cost structure more in line with revenue just incredibly seriously because we have lots of very talented people who were impacted by that. And so I do think that we feel confident in that exit rate. And as I have said, it will certainly imply that year-over-year growth as we lap some of the investments that we have made will be quite small.

Brad Zelnick: Thanks for the color.

Brett Iversen: Thanks Brad. Joe, next question please.

Operator: Our next question comes from the line of Brad Reback with Stifel. Please proceed.

Brad Reback: Great. Thanks very much. On Office 365 Commercial, with you guys approaching 400 million seats and the E5 business really starting to accelerate here on that consolidated sort of expense ROI that you are putting forth, should we think about the growth there more evenly balanced between seats and ARPU going forward or still to continue to favor seats? Thanks.

Amy Hood: Yes. That’s a good question, especially because this quarter you started to see a little bit more of that ARPU influence. And as you might have gathered from your question and I will just reinforce it, as we see some of this moderating seat growth, whether that’s some of the new SKU weakness that we had talked about, some of the standalone stuff, you are starting to also see E5 ARPU happen at the same time. So, it does create some stability in that Office 365 Commercial revenue number. So, we are seeing still good seat growth, still growth across all workloads. And as you are pointing out, we are getting further into the E5 health, where we have seen, I want to say, four or four really good quarters of E5 adoption.

The value there is just very high for customers in this environment between analytics, security, and I think we have given some, I think good security data points in terms of adoption. And voice, this is a place where customers can save money by moving to this suite. And I do think you are starting to see some of that ARPU help.

Satya Nadella: And we are also investing in outside of Microsoft 365 in other per user workloads. We were being a new suite, Power Platform on its own and even standalone offers like even Teams Pro and what have you. So, there is a significant amount of work we want to do besides sort of the suites that we all sort of have at scale.

Brad Reback: Great. Thank you very much.

Brett Iversen: Thanks Brad. Joe, we have time for one last question.

Operator: Our next question comes from the line of Tyler Radke with Citi. Please proceed.

Tyler Radke: Yes. Thanks for taking the question. I wanted to ask just about how your visibility has changed in terms of some of the larger Azure customer ramps. Could you just comment on, to the extent those large customer ramps or if any of those projects are getting put on pause? And then is there any way to just kind of quantify the AI potential contribution or maybe GPU-powered contribution that Azure that you are expecting over the coming quarters? Thank you.