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This time last year, almost to the day, Microsoft saw its first annual sales decline in history. Things are looking much better now, with the company reporting a record $16.04 billion in revenue, a 22 percent year-over-year increase for its Q4 revenue ending June 30th. In fact, revenue is up across all divisions, with Windows and Windows Live seeing the biggest uptick (43.5 percent to $4.55 billion) followed by Entertainment and Devices (27.3 percent to $1.6 billion). Operating income, on th... e other hand, paints a different picture of E&D, showing a $172 million loss for this quarter (compared to $141 loss in Q4 last year), but looking over the entire fiscal year, the home of Xbox and Zune this year did $679 million in operating income -- a sizable jump to the $108 million from 2009. The overall operating income for the company is $5.93 billion this quarter (net income $4.52 billion), a 49 percent increase over last Q4, and $20.36 billion for the year (18 percent compared with fiscal 2009).

We know you're interested in comparisons, so we'll just go ahead and break it down for ya: the gang in Redmond is still beating Apple in both revenue ($16.04 billion vs. $15.7 billion) and profit ($4.52 billion vs. $3.25), but that margin feels smaller than it used to. Enough to keep the rumored pressure off Ballmer? Frankly, we don't even think biplanes could knock the man off the top of a tower, but Windows Phone 7 has a lot to prove, and fast. Microsoft is hosting a webcast of its report later today -- usually much ado about nothing, as far as we're concerned, but we'll listen in and let ya know if anything interesting pops up.

Update: Some interesting Xbox 360 statistics. 1.5 million consoles were sold this last quarter. Xbox Live has 25 million members, and for the first time since its inception, the revenue from the Marketplace exceeded subscription revenue.

Microsoft reports $4.5b in profit, a record $16.04b in revenue originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 22 Jul 2010 17:14:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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