On Tuesday, Microsoft presented its results for the October-December quarter, which showed a 12% drop in profits to 16.43 billion dollars, reflecting the economic uncertainty that led it to lay off 10,000 workers.

Excluding extraordinary results, profit was 2.32 dollars per share, still above Wall Street's expectation of 2.29 dollars.

Turnover was 52.75 billion dollars, a year-on-year increase of two percent, but below the average of 52.99 billion that analysts consulted by FactSet were expecting.

Last week, Microsoft blamed "macroeconomic conditions and changes in customer priorities" for its decision to eliminate around five percent of its workforce. Microsoft is one of several large technology companies that have recently announced massive layoffs, such as Google, Amazon, Salesforce and Meta, the holding company of Facebook.

On Monday, in an effort to integrate the latest advances in artificial technology into its products, Microsoft announced "investments of billions of dollars over several years" in the artificial intelligence start-up OpenAI, maker of ChatGPT and other tools that can write readable text and computer code and generate images. (Noticias ao Minuto)