Microsoft New Zealand Announces 18% Revenue Growth

Microsoft Office, Windows 2000 and Office 2000 add to success

Auckland, New Zealand - Friday 20 July 2001 - Microsoft New Zealand today announced 18% revenue growth for its fiscal year 2000-2001. This growth was also reflected in headcount, with 32 new employees recruited during the year, bringing the total New Zealand full time staff to 95.

Strong reasons for the continued revenue growth were the on-going success of Microsoft® Windows 2000 in the local market, and latterly, the release of Office XP.

Microsoft New Zealand's Managing Director, Geoff Lawrie, said encouraging trends for the coming year include the launch of the Windows XP operating system in October. Further, the continued sales momentum of Microsoft technologies like Windows 2000 and Microsoft SQL Server®, will also drive significant growth in the business-to-business and business-to-consumer e-commerce area.

"This year, we will start to see a lot of activity around our .NET strategy with related developer tools such as Visual Studio .NET about to be released on the New Zealand market. This will certainly help drive the growth of the online commerce area for us in the coming year, " said Geoff Lawrie.

Ends

© Scoop Media