San Francisco, Jul 28 (IANS): Riding once again on the stronger-than-expected Azure Cloud growth, Microsoft has posted a healthy revenue of $46.2 billion, up 21 per cent, with $16.5 billion in net income that rose 47 per cent in the June quarter.

According to Chairman and CEO Satya Nadella, new franchises including gaming, security, and LinkedIn surpassed $10 billion in annual revenue over the past three years.

"Our results show that when we execute well and meet customers' needs in differentiated ways in large and growing markets, we generate growth, as we've seen in our commercial cloud," Nadella said in a statement late on Tuesday.

The commercial cloud revenue grew 36 per cent year over year to $19.5 billion.

"As we closed out the fiscal year, our sales teams and partners delivered a strong quarter with over 20 per cent top and bottom-line growth, highlighted by commercial bookings growth of 30 per cent year over year," said Amy Hood, executive vice president and chief financial officer of Microsoft.

Revenue in Productivity and Business Processes was $14.7 billion and increased 25 per cent.

LinkedIn revenue increased 46 per cent while dynamics products and cloud services revenue increased 33 per cent.

Overall revenue in the device segment was $14.1 billion and increased 9 per cent, said Microsoft.

However, Xbox content and services revenue decreased 4 per cent and Surface laptop revenue also decreased 20 per cent owing to supply challenges.

Microsoft returned $10.4 billion to shareholders in the form of share repurchases and dividends in the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2021, an increase of 16 per cent compared to the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2020.