Microsoft will come out ‘pretty strong’, Satya Nadella on Covid-19 impact

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said he was confident that the company will come out strong following the disruption caused by the Covid-19 pandemic worldwide.

"We have a great balance sheet, we are a very diverse business, we have a mix of annuity, non-annuity, that is also stronger than even the last time we even went into the financial crisis. I feel confident we'll come out of this, frankly, pretty strong," he said in an interview to CNBC.

Nadella acknowledged that the company's Azure and cloud services were under immense pressure as millions of people are staying home and working remotely. Microsoft's Teams, a workplace collaboration tool, has become one of the top platforms for work-from-home employees. Teams is also being used for educational purposes.

"If this was a previous generation of data center architectures or software architectures, I don't think we would have been able to deal with this crisis as effectively as we have been able to," Nadella said.

On availability of the hardware products the company had originally planned, Nadella said the supply chain was coming back up in Asia. He, however, expressed concern on how the demand will be in the US and Europe which have been hit hard by the coronavirus pandemic.

Earlier, Nadella in a letter to employees had described the pandemic as an "unchartered territory."

"We are in uncharted territory. Much is unknown, and I know how unsettling and uncertain this feels. Like many of you, there have been times over the past weeks where it has felt overwhelming and all-encompassing for me. I worry about the health and safety of my family, my co-workers, and friends. My wife and I worry for her aging parents, who are far away from us in India. I see the struggle in our local community, and around the world, the empty streets and restaurants, and I wonder when our social fabric will be restored," he said in a Linkedin post.