Microsoft Posts Gain Despite Soft PC Sales

SEATTLE — Microsoft said its net income rose 6 percent in its first fiscal quarter, but the company’s results continued to reflect weak growth in PC sales

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The PC market, especially the part representing the companies using Microsoft’s Windows operating system, has suffered lately as economic uncertainty has crimped spending on information technology. Newer types of devices like tablets and mobile phones have sapped some of the business as well.

Microsoft said net income rose to $5.74 billion, or 68 cents a share, from $5.41 billion, or 62 cents a share, a year ago. Revenue rose 7 percent, to $17.37 billion, from $16.2 billion a year ago.

Analysts estimated that, on average, Microsoft would earn 68 cents a share on revenue of $17.24 billion, according to Thomson Reuters. Microsoft’s shares fell 1 percent after it released the financial results at the close of normal trading.

Microsoft said its revenue from selling Windows rose less than 2 percent during its first quarter, which ended Sept. 30. That reflects the fact that shipments of new PCs grew only 3.6 percent globally in the quarter, which ended Sept. 30, according to the research firm IDC. Apple defied the trend, reporting a 26 percent increase in the number of Macs sold during the same period, the company said on Tuesday.

Brendan Barnicle, an analyst at Pacific Crest Securities, said the company’s revenue from Windows sales was weaker than he had expected. “We’ve now had a year where Windows hasn’t come in in-line with analyst expectations,” he said. “It’s less of a miss than in the past.”

The Microsoft division that includes its Office suit of applications fared better than Windows, with a revenue increase of almost 8 percent. That division — Microsoft’s largest, representing a third of total revenue — got a boost from a new version of Office released last year that continues to sell well for the company, despite competition from free and low-cost online applications from Google and others.

One problem for Microsoft is that some of the stronger sources of growth in the PC business are now in developing markets like China. While that is good news for other players in the PC business, like Intel, that make hardware components, Microsoft has a harder time in those regions because of rampant software piracy and lower average selling prices for its products.

Microsoft’s Windows business is also facing a growing challenger in the iPad. Tech industry executives are divided over the degree to which Apple’s tablet computer is eroding sales of traditional PCs.

This week, Apple’s chief executive, Timothy D. Cook, said he thought that the iPad was cannibalizing some sales of Macs, but that a “materially larger” number of iPad buyers were choosing the tablet device over a Windows PC. Apple sold 11.1 million iPads in its last quarter. “With cannibalization like this, I hope it continues,” Mr. Cook said.

Microsoft intends to tackle the threat from the iPad with a new version of Windows, known currently as Windows 8, that has been redesigned for the touch screens of tablet devices, but that product is not expected to appear for about a year.

Peter Klein, Microsoft’s chief financial officer, said in an interview that the company had greater demand from businesses for Windows than it had from the consumer market, where the iPad has had a big impact on the low-end laptop computers known as netbooks.