Microsoft to raise prices by up to 22% for UK customers after post-brexit fall in the value of the pound
Due to a fall in the value of the pound, Microsoft is to increase its prices by as much as 22% in the UK.
This rise is set to affect thousands of businesses, including the Government, whose IT spend on Microsoft contracts could increase by tens of millions of pounds.
There has been an 18% drop in the value of sterling against the dollar since the EU referendum on June 23 and Microsoft is one of a number of global operators to pass on a post-referendum price rise. Others include Unilver, who attempted a 10% price increase on the products it supplies to British supermarkets. This lead to a standoff with Tesco after it removed Unilever’s products from its online store.
With a suite of Office programs including Word, Powerpoint and Outlook, as well as Azure, a cloud service used by customers including the Ministry of Defence, Microsoft is one of the biggest sellers of business software in the UK.
Costs for Microsoft enterprise customers are set to increase by 13% for computer software products and 22% for online cloud services, i.e. where the company hosts a customer’s data in a virtual storage centre.
However, Microsoft said it would not increase prices for existing consumers and ongoing contracts, but rather to new purchases. Regardless of this, many businesses will likely need to raise their IT budgets or sacrifice other projects in order to pay for these increased charges.
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