Investing.com – Microsoft stock (NASDAQ:MSFT) rose 2% Thursday as the company said it will hike prices of Office 365, its “first substantive pricing update” in a decade of the suite of applications.
The price hike, of as much as 20%, will be effective March 1 and cover only commercial products. Prices of education and consumer products will remain unchanged.
Basic business plans will be costlier by 20% and will come for $6 per user, while the highest-end versions of the suite will have a smaller increase of 12.5% to $36 per user.
Office 365 now has over 300 million commercial paid seats, said Jared Spataro, corporate vice president for Microsoft 365, who announced the price hike in a blog post.
The suit of applications under Microsoft Office 365 includes Windows, Office (MS Word, Excel, PowerPoint), MS Teams, Outlook and Enterprise Mobility and Security solutions.
The Microsoft 365 suite had sales of $53.9 billion in financial year 2021, almost a third of Microsoft's overall $168.1 billion in sales.