Microsoft has announced that its Surface tablet revenues rose to $893 million during Q2 of its fiscal year compared to $400 million in Q1.
During an investors’ conference call, WSJ quoted Microsoft CFO Amy Hood as saying that demand for the company’s Surface product portfolio "continued to grow, benefiting from improved execution at retail and favoruable reviews of the new Surface devices".
She said that "both units and revenue more than doubled this quarter" as more customers get used to a device that functions as both a tablet and a laptop.
“We feel good about the progress we have made over the past couple of quarters, and are enthusiastic about the overall opportunity ahead with Surface," said Hood.
The results come in stark contrast to last summer, when Microsoft announced that it had suffered a $900 million write off down to poor Surface tablet sales.
It is believed to have sold only 260,000 Surface RTs and 750,000 Surface Pros in that time.
However, despite the claims, Microsoft hasn’t released concrete sales figures for the tablet line, and are still making losses. With new versions of the Surface tablets coming out last October, it was expected for sales figures to rise, but with a total cost of revenue for the Surface family at $932 million Microsoft are still around $40 million away from breaking even.
At the start of this year, Microsoft started shipping the Surface Pro 2 tablet with a new CPU, much to the dismay of many customers. The firmware was then updated to try and rectify software issues customers were experiencing.
